Do You Love Them, or Their Qualities?

Bölüm metni

If someone asked you why you love the person you love, you would have a list ready: their good heart, their smile, the way they talk to you. But if tomorrow someone turns up with more of those very same qualities, are you supposed to transfer your love to them? If your answer is "no," then those qualities you listed are not the reason for your love — so what is?

If someone asked you why you love the person you love, you would have a list ready: their good heart, their laugh, the particular way they talk to you. But suppose that tomorrow somebody turns up carrying more of every one of those same qualities. Are you then obliged to transfer your love over to them? If your answer is no, then those qualities you listed are not the reason for your love. So what is?

At a dinner table one evening, after a long silence, someone turns to the person sitting across from them and says: I love you for your mind, for that strange sense of humour of yours, for that stubbornness nobody else can pull off. It sounds like one of the most beautiful sentences a person could hear. The other one smiles. But listen to that sentence again, this time taking it seriously, assuming it means precisely what it says. Because there, inside the compliment, there is a crack that takes about a second to notice and then never quite leaves your head again.

If you love me for my intelligence, what happens when you meet someone more intelligent than I am? If you love me for my sense of humour, shouldn't the address of your love change the moment somebody funnier walks in? The logic is mercilessly clean: if you love a thing on account of a property, then you ought to love more the thing that carries more of that property. If you choose a fabric for its softness, you will prefer the softer one. If you rent a house for its view, you move out when a house with a better view comes on the market. In philosophy this is called the problem of replaceability, and it stands like a wall in front of almost every theory that has ever tried to explain love.

Think of it this way. You go to a job interview. What is asked of you there is to enumerate your qualities. I learn quickly, I speak 3 languages, I work well with a team. Nobody in that room loves you; they are assessing you. And if the following day somebody walks through the same door carrying the same qualities with a little more of each, the job is theirs. Nobody calls that a betrayal. It is called hiring. Now here is the genuinely uncomfortable question: when we describe love as the sum of a person's properties, what separates it from a hiring process? Is the beloved merely the temporary carrier of the qualities they happen to hold? Is the appearance of those same qualities in another body, in a slightly brighter version, sufficient grounds for moving love over there?

There is a thought experiment that tightens this to the point of pain. Suppose a duplicate of the person you love turned up, someone carrying every single one of their properties exactly. The same voice, the same humour, the same walk, the same impatience, the same childhood memories, the same fragility. Not one line on the list of qualities is different. If your love is truly a response given to that list, then you have no grounds whatsoever for choosing between the two. You may as well flip a coin. And yet almost nobody accepts this conclusion. Everyone, even when they cannot explain why, says: no, I want that one. And right there, in that stubbornness we cannot account for, our subject is standing.

But suppose we go over to the other end of the dilemma. Suppose we reverse the answer and say: I love you for none of your qualities, I love you for no reason at all. It sounds more romantic, doesn't it. But take that seriously for a second as well. If I love you for no reason, then my love has nothing to do with any aspect of you. The kind of person you are, the things you care about, the way you treat people, contribute nothing whatsoever to your being loved. It could have been someone else; it could have been whoever came through the door first. My love says nothing about you at all, it says only something about me: I am the sort of person who attaches like this. At first glance this looks like unconditional love, but look inside it and it resembles a kind of indifference. What is taken for praise turns out to be a failure to see.

And there is a third case, the quietest one. Properties do not stay put. A traffic accident, a diagnosis, a person who has lost their job coming home for 6 months with the light gone out of their eyes. The one you spent years describing as the funniest person in your life loses someone close to them and does not laugh for a year. Where the quality you listed as the reason for your love used to be, there is now a gap. If the grounds have been removed, must the thing that rested on those grounds be removed too? When the clause you signed the contract for disappears, the contract lapses. If love is also a contract, it ought to lapse. And yet people stay precisely during those periods. Someone sitting in a hospital corridor, holding the hand of a person who no longer recognises them, is doing something that fits into no table of logic.

So what we have is a pair of jaws closing from both sides. If you love for the properties, then what you love is not the person but the qualities they carry; the person becomes replaceable. If you love independently of the properties, love becomes arbitrary and blind; the person disappears again. Whichever of the two doors you walk through, you cannot find the person you love anywhere in the room.

This dilemma is not a dilemma of our own age. Roughly 2400 years ago, in a house in Athens, a group of men talking around a wine table ran straight into this same question. And one of them decided to open the first door all the way, to see where loving for the properties actually leads.

Here is the scene: the year is 416 BC, in Athens. The young poet Agathon has won the tragedy competition and has gathered his friends to celebrate. Because the previous night's drinking went badly, they decide not to drink much this evening; instead they propose that each of them in turn make a speech about love. Plato recounts this night in his dialogue the Symposium. When the turn comes to Socrates, Socrates does something odd: instead of giving his own view, he relays what he was taught in his youth by a woman from Mantinea, Diotima.

What Diotima describes is a ladder. A person begins by being drawn to a single beautiful body. Then, says Diotima, there is something this person must come to notice: the beauty in one body and the beauty in another body are kin, they are the same thing. Once you have seen this, you must loosen that violent passion for the single body, even come to think little of it. That is the second rung of the ladder: to love all beautiful bodies. Then the beauty of the soul is worth more than the beauty of the body; whoever sees a beautiful soul in an unlovely body should stop there and learn to love. Then the beauty of laws, of institutions, of human affairs. Then the beauty of knowledge. And at the very top, beauty itself, confined to no single instance, to no body and no person, never born, never dying, never diminishing.

This is not a doctrine to be laughed at. It is extraordinarily consistent, and what it says is even breathtaking: what a human being really wants is to touch what is immortal, and falling in love with a body is the lowest rung of that very wanting. The ladder goes upward. But a ladder always does two things at once: it carries you up, and it leaves the rung below behind you.

And it is exactly here, some 2400 years later, that one of the sharpest objections ever raised against this teaching arrived. The Plato scholar Gregory Vlastos, in a famous study published in 1973, asked this: what is happening to the people on that ladder? Vlastos's answer was a bitter one. In this picture we do not love persons as themselves; we love them as temporary carriers of excellences. What we love is the beauty, the intelligence, the virtue that shows up in the person before us; the person is merely the address where those qualities are currently located. And the address never becomes more than an address. In Vlastos's reading, there is no room there for a flawed, ordinary, incomplete human being to be loved entire.

Do not treat this as abstract; you see it around you. The teacher who loves a student for their potential loses interest when the student fails to realise that potential. The person who describes their love by saying I fell in love with their mind feels, on the day the other does something unintelligent, not merely disappointment but something closer to a breach of contract. The family who describe their child through their achievements have no idea what to do when the failures start arriving. There is no ill will in any of this. There is the same structure in all of it: love has been fastened not to the person, but to a quality passing across the person.

In the same world, in the same centuries, Aristotle came at the problem from another direction. He divided friendships into 3 kinds: those formed for usefulness, those formed for pleasure, and those formed for virtue. What he said about the first two still holds today; the one who loves for usefulness is in fact loving not the other person but the usefulness that comes from them, and when the usefulness is gone, the friendship goes with it. That much is true, but it does not solve our problem. Because the friendship Aristotle ranked highest also rests on a quality, namely virtue. If I love the person before me because they are a good person, the question of what happens when a better person shows up is still sitting on the table. The Greek world saw the dilemma with great clarity, but could not get out of the jaws.

The answer that loosened those jaws came several centuries later, in a very different geography, and it came not from someone building a metaphysics but from someone who observed lovers one by one and took notes.

Ibn Hazm was born in Córdoba in 994, the son of a family that had served in the upper ranks of the state, and he spent his youth watching the order of al-Andalus collapse. Their house was plundered, his father died, he himself went into exile repeatedly and spent time in prison. Around the year 1022, in Játiva, responding to a friend's insistence that he write a book on love, he sat down and wrote one. Its original title is Tawq al-Hamama, that is, The Ring of the Dove. That this book reached us at all is close to an accident: the only manuscript copy known in the world sits in the Netherlands, in the library of Leiden University.

The Ring of the Dove is not a hymn to love. It is a notebook of observations. Ibn Hazm separates his chapters with the fastidiousness of a natural scientist: the nature of love, the signs of love, loving at a single glance, loving in a dream, loving on the strength of a description alone, messengers, those who keep the secret, separation, forgetting, death. Looking at that sequence, one feels less like reading a book about love than an atlas of a disease, which is largely what Ibn Hazm is doing: he recounts the lovers he has seen, one by one, most often concealing their names.

And he says the thing that lands in the very middle of our question. Ibn Hazm argues that the cause of love is not beauty. His grounds are not theoretical but observational: if the cause were beauty, everyone would attach themselves to whoever is most beautiful. But that is not what actually happens. People look at someone far more beautiful, pass by, and give their hearts to another; and what is more, they cannot explain it to themselves either. For him, love is to be sought not in the sum of countable qualities but in a kinship between souls.

But the most striking passage in the book on this matter is Ibn Hazm's own confession. He writes that in his youth he gave his heart to a fair-haired woman. And he adds: from that day on, however highly the beauty of dark-haired women was praised, he could never again incline toward it. Think that sentence through once more, slowly. Because here the whole business turns around.

Here is what we assume: first we come to like certain qualities, then we find someone carrying those qualities, then we love them. The list comes first, the person second. What Ibn Hazm describes is the exact reverse. First he loved that person. Then the quality that person carried became, for him, the measure of beauty itself. The list is not the cause of the love but its consequence. We do not choose the person we love because of their properties; the person we love rewrites which properties we will find beautiful.

You can test this in your own life. The way someone wrinkles their nose when they laugh, the meaningless little word they wedge into the middle of a sentence, the cracked sound of their voice in the morning. None of these were on any list of sought-after qualities. Nobody goes through life saying I would like to meet someone who wrinkles their nose. But once you have loved that person, that wrinkle becomes the most endearing thing in the world. Ibn Hazm noted this too: after a while, lovers become unable to see the flaw in the one they love as a flaw at all, and will even defend that flaw and praise it.

The subtlety here is this: Ibn Hazm is not denying the properties. He is not saying that love is a blind collision entirely independent of them. What he is talking about is the direction of the arrow of causation. Properties are the door, not the house. A person enters a house through the door; but once they have begun to live in it, the reason they love that door is no longer the door itself, it is the life behind it.

That a man who defended the Zahiri school in law, the school known for holding to the apparent meaning of the text and regarded as closed to interpretation, should go so far beneath the apparent when it came to love, looks like an interesting contradiction. Another name from the same century, Ibn Sina, in his Treatise on Love, took love out of the category of a condition belonging only to human beings and described it as the orientation of all existing things toward their own perfection. And the well-known line attributed to Yunus Emre points somewhere else again: to love what is created not on account of the qualities it possesses, but on account of the Creator. There is something common to all 3: the grounds of love are moved off the beloved's list of properties and onto something else.

But Ibn Hazm's answer leaves a question open. Let us say we came in through the door. What happens over 30 years in the house?

In 1563, when his friend Étienne de La Boétie died, Montaigne spent years looking for a way to describe that friendship. In his Essays, published in 1580, trying to explain why he had been so attached, he finally gave up and, saying that no reason was sufficient, wrote this: because it was he, because it was I. That sentence has been quoted for centuries, and is usually read as a poetic evasion. But there is a thesis inside it. Montaigne locates the grounds of love not in the qualities of the other, but in the meeting of 2 people as those particular persons.

Contemporary philosophy has followed exactly this trail. Niko Kolodny's proposal, set out in 2003, is this: love does have a reason, but that reason is not a property; it is the relationship itself. I love this person because they are the one I have lived with for 10 years, the mother or the father of my child, the person who sat beside me when I was ill. This answers both the logic of the ladder and the duplicate at once. Because a shared history cannot be copied. Even if someone walked through the door carrying every one of their properties, our 10 years are not in them. And 10 years is not a quality; there can be no one who carries more of it.

Harry Frankfurt went further still in 2004. For him, love is not a response given to the value of the other; it is the very thing that creates the value. His example is plain: parents do not love their children because their children are valuable; their children are valuable to them because they love them. Nobody examines the qualities of a newborn and then decides. There, love comes first and the reasons form afterwards. Frankfurt's claim is that adult love resembles this structure far more closely than it appears to.

But is love a feeling or a decision that is kept up? In 1986 Amelie Rorty turned this question around from a fine angle. The famous standard in Shakespeare's sonnet 116 says that what alters in the face of alteration is not love. Rorty inverted it: the real defect lies in the love that does not change when the beloved changes. Because people do change. A person at 40 is not the same as the one at 20. To preserve, entirely unaltered, the love you felt for the 20 year old is not fidelity; it is ceasing to see the person in front of you. For Rorty, the real test of love is not remaining fixed, but being able to go on getting to know the other person again and again.

Which brings us to what Erich Fromm said in 1956, in The Art of Loving. Fromm's real concern was to show that love is not a talent but an art, that is, something that has to be learned and practised. For him, love understood merely as a feeling is an unreliable foundation, because feelings come and go; love is at the same time a decision, a judgement, and a promise.

Returning in the light of all this to the question we began with, it becomes clear that the question itself has been slightly badly built. Do you love them, or their qualities. That question takes the door and the house to be rivals. But the properties are not the reason for love, they are the way the meeting happened. Someone's laugh stops you, their intelligence brings you closer, their honesty makes it easier to stay. Without those you would have walked right past. But what accumulates over the years is no longer that list; it is a night spent at the hospital, a dog buried together, the silent peace made in the kitchen 2 hours after the argument. Nobody can count these as a property, because they do not belong to the person, they belong to what is between the 2 of you.

So the sentence I love you for that quality of yours is not a lie; it is half of one. The whole of it is something more like this: I noticed you through that quality, then you and I built a history, and the reason I love you now is that history. In practice there is only one test of this, and it is taken not on the day the sentence is spoken but on the day the grounds disappear. The person who has heard they are loved for their intelligence finds out whether they are still loved at the end of a week in which they were exhausted and could not say a single clever thing.

And Diotima's ladder was not wrong about everything. A human being really does try to become someone worth loving; nobody wants to give up their qualities and freeze where they stand. But what the ladder forgot was this: nobody wants to be loved as a specimen. Not as one copy of beauty, of intelligence, of goodness, but by their name, with their flaws, with that wrinkling nose, as someone for whom no substitute can be put. Perhaps that is love's real work in the face of the properties: to take a person out of a list and turn them into a name.

Nöron Philosophy'de bugünkü bölümün sonuna geldik. Yeni bir hikâyede yeniden buluşmak üzere.