Greek manners and Gothic morals

Love as irrationality
One of the things that polemicists tend to do is to open battles on multiple fronts and Nehring does that in a big way in the first chapter of her book A Vindication of Love. I want to slow her down a whole lot here and go through the various fronts one at a time, taking time to notice differences and even similarities that she misses.

She starts with Stendhal. He is, to our way of thinking, an odd character but he was hugely influential in his time. When I went through something of a hard-core feminist phase in my early university days I read Simone de Beauvoir and she can't think of enough nice things to say about Stendhal. If I remember correctly—life is too short to read de Beauvoir twice—she somewhere says that he is the only male novelist to really understand love. That is quite jarring, as Nehring notes, if you take the time to unpack what Stndhal says about love a bit.

For Stendhal regards love as an irrational projection; as something magnificent that the lover only imagines he sees in his beloved. And here, as Nehring brilliantly draws out, there is a problem. For if the magnificence that leads the lover to fall in love is not in the person he loves, where is it? There is only one possible answer here and that is in the lover himself. And I write "himself" advisedly here, for as Nehring further notes, this quality of projecting good is only attributed to men. When women did it, they were treated as irresponsible or delusional.

There is a further odd consequence of this projection. And, again, this all makes sense if we go through it step by step. If the love object herself is not magnificent but merely has magnificence projected onto her, then she cannot possibly live up to what we think we see in her. If our love begins to falter, then the worst thing (if we believe Stendhal) is to actually spend a lot of time with her. For any time with her can only waken us to the gap between the person herself and our image of her.

The only real question here is why anyone would call this love at all. Psychologically speaking it sounds like narcissism; epistemologically speaking it sounds like solipsism. And it sounds like those things in both cases because it is those things. I'll tell you one other thing it sounds like modernism to me. I'm going out on a limb here with this modernism claim so don't feel obliged to agree with me.

Anyway, there is a further consequence of the above. If you really believed what Stendhal did, then you would advise the woman who felt her suitor's interest lagging to withdraw herself and to make her lover jealous as a way of restoring his interest. And that is exactly what Stendhal does advise. (And his biggest disciple in this is Proust.)

To my mind there is a huge problem here and it is that nothing here sounds like anything I think worthy of the name love. It does sound a little like some accounts of romantic love though and if we want want to vindicate romantic love—and I do—then we have to deal with that. Tomorrow.

This series begins here.

The next post will be here.