2/ What Is Contempt?
If love, as we have suggested, has not received the philosophical attention it deserves, this is even more true of contempt—a feeling that has undergone little analysis.
Nonetheless, Hobbes offers the following definition of contempt: Those things which we neither desire nor hate, we are said to contemn
1.
He subsequently provides a materialist explanation, as is characteristic of his approach, by relating it to vital movement: Contempt being nothing else but an immobility or contumacy of the heart in resisting the action of certain things; and proceeding from that the heart is already moved otherwise, by other more potent objects, or from want of experience of them
2.
Finally, he observes that contempt and hatred lead us to perceive objects differently: Whatsoever is […] the object of his hate and aversion [is called] evil; and of his contempt, vile and inconsiderable
3.
I propose a modification of Hobbes’s definition as follows: I define contempt as the feeling opposed to both love and hate. While love attributes a positive value to its object and hate a negative one, contempt strips the object of all value, whether positive or negative. Defined in this way, each of these concepts remains consistent and irreducible to the others.
If we were to deny this—asserting, for instance, that saying to the beloved, 'You have no value' or 'You have a negative value' could still be called love—we might then ask: what name would we give to a relationship that says, 'You have great value'? And what, then, is contempt? What does the person who despises convey to the one they despise?
We recall that desire can coexist with contempt for the desired object, as desire is merely a subjective feeling of pleasure. Therefore, love, which also involves this feeling of pleasure, must be distinguished from both desire and contempt by something—namely, the axiological judgement that attributes value to the beloved.
From this, we might deduce that while desire can coexist with contempt for the desirable—and may even be inherently associated with it, as desire does not affirm the value of its object—love, by contrast, necessarily encompasses the notion of respect for the beloved. By this, I do not mean that love and respect are two distinct yet necessarily linked concepts. Rather, love itself embodies the meaning we might otherwise attribute to respect—namely, the act of ascribing great value to the beloved.
To love something is to respect it, but in an analytically identical sense, akin to saying 'a dwarf is a small man': the second term is merely a restatement of the first. Thus, we will speak only of love, not respect, recognising that love inherently encompasses the notion of respect, which we had previously thought necessary to distinguish.
1. Leviathan, I, 6
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.