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 been subjected to very little analysis.

Hobbes does, however, offer the following definition of contempt: Those things which we neither desire nor hate, we are said to contemn ¹.

He subsequently provides a characteristically materialist explanation, 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.

He further 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 to modify Hobbes's definition as follows: contempt is 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 coherent and irreducible to the others.

Were we to deny this—asserting, for instance, that saying to the beloved, 'You have no value' or 'You have a negative value' could still count as love—we might then ask: what name would we give to a relationship in which one says, 'You have great value'? And what, in that case, is contempt? What does the person who despises convey to the one they despise?
We have seen that desire can coexist with contempt for the desired object, since desire is merely a subjective feeling of pleasure. Love, which also involves this feeling of pleasure, must therefore be distinguished from both desire and contempt by something additional—namely, the axiological judgement that attributes value to the beloved.

From this we might infer that while desire can coexist with contempt for its object—and may even be inherently associated with it, since desire does not affirm the value of its object—love, by contrast, necessarily carries within it 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—that is, the act of ascribing great value to the beloved.

To love something is to respect it, but in an analytically identical sense, much as one might say 'a dwarf is a small man': the second term is merely a restatement of the first. We shall therefore speak only of love, not of respect, recognising that love inherently encompasses the notion of respect, which we had previously thought it necessary to distinguish.

1. Leviathan, I, 6
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.