To think about love is less exciting than to feel it, and perhaps that is why love receives scant critical attention. As often as we invoke it, we seldom stop to think about it, and this leaves us assuming that we agree on what it is. But can love be defined, or should it? There are those who think that love defies all definition. To define it takes the wind out of the sails of love’s passion, and spoils the spontaneity of its dynamically radiant presence. Love, it seems, stands outside the remit of reflective knowledge, transcending our meager attempts to lay hold of its content. And at any rate, who among us has the right to define love? Surely no one but the lover in whom love comes to dwell, we insist, has any right to define the feeling and its ultimate significance. 

Modern philosophy is not much better at thinking about love, though for somewhat different reasons. The French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion expresses outright dismay at the silence of modern philosophy on so crucial a topic. Surely philosophia, the love of wisdom, has abandoned her vocation upon failing to tend to the basis on which her discipline rests. Marion’s project is to recapture what he calls “the erotic phenomenon.” This is the condition without which philosophy becomes unintelligible to itself and on which hangs the intelligibility of even calling ourselves human. Surely the basis of our humanity commands closer attention! Love in fact invites us to examine its form, structure, and content, in order to derive from it crucial insights into the human condition. With all due respect to Descartes, Marion puts it thus: “I love, therefore I am.” Try as we might to isolate love from the self—the project of modern philosophy, in a nutshell—the self becomes intelligible to itself only by existing through love.

If this is so, then in order to learn the truth about ourselves, we need to reconceive ourselves as lovers on the way. That invites us to think again about the meaning of love, and to seize upon the questions that this thinking provokes, in order to open up a conversation on the significance of love for revealing essential aspects of the human condition.

Love is a Place

The first claim we wish to make is that love is a place; love, that is, presupposes our placement in the world. To occupy a place involves several components. One major component is the presence of a beloved, an object to which one feels attracted and summoned. No one loves in a vacuum. The statement “I love” is a vacuous one; it cries out for some description of the object one loves. By object, of course, we do no mean mere object or “thing.” We are talking about the grammar of the activity of love, the fact that we cannot love without also loving something (or someone). This condition presupposes our placement in the world. In order to love something I need to be somewhere, for that somewhere serves as the condition for the possibility of loving something. Here is a good example: I arrive on the university campus for the first time as an undergraduate, when suddenly a beautiful face overtakes my field of vision. This face might have caught my eyes in a different setting, a different place, but the present context renders my encounter with this face rather special, and indeed, I come to believe that I am “falling in love,” as freshmen are wont to do in the first weeks of term.

In this encounter, the significance of my placement comes home. It feeds my deep need to establish roots through belonging, and it makes this foreign place the “university” more inviting, investing my presence there with significance and purpose. All that may seem straightforward and trivial on the surface, but it conceals an incredible truth about the thing that makes us human. For this condition ultimately reveals something important about ourselves: we cannot simply describe ourselves as individual monads, selves-in-isolation, but rather find our “selves” ever searching for a place to belong, a place to call home. Freshmen know this feeling well. On campus for the first time, they are separated from home, and the isolation shapes their initial experience of the place they now reside. Not to belittle their encounter with that beautiful face, but falling in love seems to effect for them a necessary transition by initiating the next phase of their journey to adulthood. It solidifies their sense of place by giving their love a concrete object and by granting them freedom from their former affective attachments (such as a high-school sweetheart). What is more, parents recognize this change is taking place, and good parents remain patient with the transitioning process. Conversely, it is tragic when the child fails to form attachments, only to return home feeling despondent and disillusioned about the future. Though quietly they may relish their child’s longing for “the way things were,” parents know that their child needs to form new bonds of affection lest the time at university fails to facilitate his or her development.

But this process does not signal merely a transition to adulthood, important as that is, but it also indicates the child’s opening to a much larger world, indeed the world, as well as to the question that is implicit to the journey. This question will occupy us momentarily. First, I want to call attention to an account of human love that to my mind precisely captures this oh-so-human experience. In his recent book Love: A History (Yale, 2011), British philosopher Simon May argues that true love is misunderstood. It isn’t unconditional, disinterested, or impartial, despite our assumption that these constitute true love. Rather true love is thoroughly conditioned by the object that attracts, and more importantly by our desire to find a home in the object. May puts it thus: “Love... is the rapture we feel for people and things that inspire in us the hope of an indestructible grounding for our life. It is a rapture that sets us off on—and sustains—the long search for a secure relationship between our being and theirs” (6).

May’s definition of love no doubt invites a thousand qualifications. Does it really capture what we mean by the word love? Is it not an overly romanticized, even religious definition, one that deals far too much in feelings and emotions? Yet according to May, the confusion really lies with us, particularly, that is, with our modern devotion to “unconditional love.” To understand true love as essentially unconditional, May argues, renders opaque the true nature of the human­love-relationship. However we might define the true nature of God’s love—and May has his doubts about the project—it does no good simply to transplant the standard of divine love to the realm of human relationships where it makes no sense. In fact, May argues that, conceptually speaking, there is no such thing as unconditional love. Love involves by definition some kind of condition, some modicum of a need and desire that must be filled. To return to our previous example: the freshman student who falls in love has one basic need, one condition that governs and inspires her longing, and that is her desire to find a place to belong, an object/person that can grant her an “indestructible grounding” for her life.

In the end, May argues, it is our desire to “come home” that conditions and complicates the human experience. Yet there is more than meets the eye in this conception of love, and this requires adding another component to flesh out our understanding. Love is not only a place. It is also, and perhaps first of all, a direction.

Love is a Direction

Rowan Williams puts his finger on precisely this issue when offering a pithy account of the human condition. In his Lenten book Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles Our Judgment (2003), Williams writes: “The hardest thing in the world is to be where we are” (21, 89). I take it that Williams is not intending to be literal—though sometimes it is literally hard to be where we are, e.g. in a boring lecture!—but rather gesturing to the claim that we opened this essay with: the fact that “to be” implies our status as lovers. Love, however, is never simply a state we inhabit, but a dynamic process of exchange and intimate participation. It is in fact a direction much more than a state, for to love someone is to move with them and be moved by them. Yet even before we are moved by the one we claim to love, we are restlessly seeking someone or something to love. Thus, the phenomenon of freshmen falling in love brings to light the desire that implicitly drives us. Not that this desire must always seek romance, though it often does, but that it always stands behind and directs our existence as a powering motivation of the restless human heart.

Williams’s message is that “where we are” invariably invites a struggle. That is because of who we are as lovers on the way. Philosophers like to call this the “ecstasy of being.” The Greek term ekstasis means “to be or stand outside ­oneself, a removal to elsewhere” (Wikipedia). It involves a kind of displacement of the mind or soul, which in turn explains love’s search for a place to call home. Understanding this aspect of love is critically important. The Christian mystic Simone Weil, in a moving essay entitled “The Love of God and Affliction,” describes the peril that surrounds our misconception of love. “It is only necessary to know,” Weil writes, “that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction” (81). By affliction Weil means more than suffering, and much more than physical suffering, though it must include that. She defines affliction as “physical pain, distress of soul, and social degradation, all at the same time,” an experience she likens to a “nail whose point is applied at the very center of the soul, whose head is all necessity spreading throughout time and space” (81). To unpack the riches of this description would take an essay in itself. To give it some initial context, Weil is clearly referring to the Crucifixion of Christ. The Cross of Christ, she suggests, provides the perfect model of “extreme affliction,” for here is concentrated all the horror of human depravity and cosmic necessity. And yet, Weil further suggests, it is enough to know, even in this darkest moment, that love is not a state; it is a direction. “The hardest thing in the world is to be where we are.” But to know that “where we are” is always in some sense incomplete; that we do not find here the ultimate grounding for our life, even despite the loves we so deeply and rightly cherish; to know that much, suggests Weil, not only prepares us to endure affliction, but also the quiet question at the heart of human existence.

The freshman who falls in love may well fall out of love, and through this she may come to know herself as a lover on the way. One fears, however, that the way in which we moderns experience romance has caused us to lose sight of its transcendent horizon. And not only romance, but also the love of wisdom: that rapturous desire which once seized hold of Augustine and Boethius, Catherine and Hildegard, and today Williams and Weil, as well as countless other saints and figures dotting the Western cultural landscape. Where did it go? Does the love that moves us, directs us, no longer open us to the big questions?

Love is not just a place, not just a direction: it is fundamentally a question that is given to us, and which invites us and entices us to make a response.

Love is a Question

To make this claim, admittedly, moves us beyond easy agreements. One can expect general agreement that love is a place and a direction, but to derive from these aspects of love a corresponding question—a question such as “what is the meaning of life?” or “why am I here?”—strikes some moderns as dangerous thinking or simply a dead-end. One example will suffice. In an interview with the English philosopher Simon Critchley, the interviewer asks Critchley to respond to the challenge posed by Nietzsche: if God is dead, wherein do we find meaning for our existence? In “human finitude,” responds Critchley, and he goes on to explain:

 [T]he answer is given in the question. The only answer to the question of the meaning of life has to begin from the fact of our human finitude, of our vulnerability and our fallibility…. [W]e have to, in a sense, give up the question of the meaning of life, or at least hear it in a particular way… [O]nce we’ve accepted that the meaning of life is ours to make, we make meaning. Then we accept that we live in a situation, or, rather, that we inherit a situation of meaninglessness, and out of that meaninglessness we create meaning in relationship to the ordinariness of our common existence. (quoted in Stauffer 2003, 1)

 The point of citing Critchley’s response is not to take him out of context—readers should visit the online interview to hear his full opinion—but to show that what we think about love has cosmic significance and forces us to face questions that destabilize assumptions.

Critchley may well be right about the meaninglessness of modern life, but does his proposal that we create meaning finally satisfy as an answer? How might this be determined philosophically or otherwise? The simple fact is that we cannot just determine it abstractly. The answer, or rather the question has to be lived with and through, and this requires time and patience as we labor in search of truth. I very much doubt that many people have a desire to “live with the question,” to borrow another phrase from Williams, but that reflects more a culture ill-attuned to such encounters, and possibly a bit adverse to any “threat” of disruption. On this score, I must agree with Critchley’s proposal of acceptance as the first step to us admitting we have a question to face. What I cannot understand, though, and what makes reading thinkers like Critchley exhausting, intellectually and spiritually, is that the answer to our deepest question lies ultimately in us; that “we make meaning” can create for us the home that we desire.

There is another perspective, another mythos of desire, that distills the human condition into a simple but startling truth. It is a truth that thinkers like Critchley believe has had its final say, and yet it is a truth that continues to form a people learning to live with the question.

A strange intervention takes place in Genesis 3:9. Humanity has tried to recreate itself to be like God, knowing good and evil, and God reenters the story to pose a curious, destabilizing question: Where are you? And that question, should love possess the characteristics we described, might well sum up the journey that humanity undertakes. It certainly helps to organize our preceding reflections by bringing love’s meaning to a culminating point. That point finds expression in the famous words of St. Augustine: “You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you” (Conf. I.1.1). By reflecting on the love that both places and disrupts us, we re-embody the (dis)position that awakens us to the question. Nothing determines outright that we shall answer it as Augustine does, but then nothing can force us to disregard the answer he gives either. A true lover is ultimately a person who hears the question of existence and is unwilling to let it be answered by empty sentimental platitudes. The great challenge facing modern Christians is to resist such platitudes, and to learn ways of embodying the question God raises to humanity. Where are you?

Ian Clausen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts at Valparaiso University.

Works Cited

Augustine. Confessions. Henry Chadwick, trans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Marion, Jean-Luc. The Erotic Phenomenon. Stephen E. Lewis, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.

May, Simon. Love: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011.

Stauffer, Jill. “Interview with Simon Critchley.” The Believer Magazine Online. August 2003. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200308/?read=interview_critchley.

Weil, Simone. Waiting on God. Emma Crawford, trans. New York: First Perennial Classics, 2001.

Williams, Rowan. Christ on Trial: How the Gospel Unsettles our Judgment. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003.