4/ The Hidden Face of Love

If the conception we have just outlined is correct, love appears to be more than a subjective feeling of pleasure at the thought or presence of the beloved, as initially suggested. Love is also an affirmation, a judgement, and even a thesis that may be summarised as: 'This, which I love, has value'. By attributing value to its object, love asserts something about it, thereby fulfilling the classical definition of a judgement. It postulates a reality—namely, the existence of value in the loved being or object—making it a kind of theory or thesis.

Love, then, is not a blind, meaningless feeling driven solely by impulses or vital forces; beyond its emotional nature, it possesses a cognitive dimension.

We might posit a chaos of forces within us, inaccessible to rationality, meaning, or analysis; it would indeed be a classical error of rationalism to deny this. I shall refer to this irrational chaos—the existence of which I acknowledge—as 'desire'. I contend, however, that we must not, as irrationalism might, deny the existence of another feeling in human beings that possesses a cognitive nature: love.

If a judgement lies at the very heart of love, we must consider how it is expressed. In the first place, it is a judgement that need not be explicitly formulated. It would be absurd to suppose that one must explicitly declare, 'You have great value', in order to love something. Even if some form of explicit affirmation might be required in the context of marital love, we cannot assume this holds for all forms of love.

A judgement can, in fact, be made instinctively or unconsciously: a newborn feeding by instinct implicitly embraces the notion that he must live (for otherwise, he would not feed). This kind of judgement—which genuinely possesses a cognitive character while simultaneously being an expression of a vital, instinctive process—is difficult to conceptualise. We tend to operate within a reductive dualism, separating irrationality—deprived of all meaning and judgement—from logical, explicit, rational judgements made in full awareness and studied in the relatively austere treatises of formal logic.

This type of judgement, which I believe lies at the heart of love—a form of rationality intertwined with the irrational—merits careful consideration.

My position may be summarised as follows: axiological judgement does exist, but it cannot be reduced to logical judgement. Rather, axiological judgement is precisely what unsettles the classical dualisms—rational/irrational, reason/feeling, logical/illogical, cognitive/pathological—dualities that contemporary thought is endeavouring to dissolve.

I therefore define love as the presence of a value judgement within a feeling of pleasure. One might object that love has been defined quite differently, particularly in its original, historical sense. Plato, for instance, defines love as a lack of the thing loved (Eros), while Aristotle defines it as enjoyment of the loved object (Philia). How can I set aside everything that has been written about love without taking it into account?
I readily acknowledge that love can also involve lack or enjoyment, which sits perfectly well with the idea of love as an affirmation of value. These aspects, however, represent only secondary features of love, pertaining not to love itself, strictly speaking, but to its concrete realisation: unrealised love becomes lack, whereas realised love transforms into enjoyment.

Love thus appears as both a feeling and a thesis—or rather, as a thesis embedded within a feeling. Yet the cognitive dimension of love would seem to have been largely overlooked, or at least accorded less attention than its irrational or sentimental dimensions, as explored or celebrated by psychoanalysis, religion, poetry, philosophy, and so on. This raises the question: might we uncover something truly significant by attending to this cognitive side—what I call 'the hidden face of love'?

To explore this, we must once again proceed negatively, by examining what would happen if we denied that love implies an axiological judgement attributing value to the beloved. In such a case, I believe, our love would be transformed into contempt. Recalling that the meaning of a concept lies in its difference from other concepts, the meaning of love will no doubt become clearer when set against its opposite: contempt.