Jose Ortega y Gasset on Love, with Thomas Aquinas (and Rene Girard) as a Foil

 

“Let us begin by talking about love, but not about "love affairs."” – so begins the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset’s introductory essay, “Features of Love” (Spanish title: Facciones del amor), contained in his On Love. Aspects of a Single Theme (Estudios sobre el amor). Arguably Rene Girard would have to disagree from the start, such an approach would smack to him of what he called romantic fallacy and which he so strongly opposed, to say the least, when analyzing human relationships. Yet the Spaniard clearly shows what both approaches, the “romantic” and the desire-based, entail, and leaves the reader free to decide whether the latter is capable of doing justice to the sentiment (his word) of love. His own answer is an unequivocal “no.” What he views as love, and sketches from a phenomenological perspective in the essay – largely via what it engenders or implies, Girard seems to leave entirely out of account.

Yet, as it is made clear in the essay, Girard’s approach could enlist the support of Thomas Aquinas thought in this respect. While not highlighting desire’s mimetic character, Aquinas nevertheless posits its preeminence in structuring man's orientation and actions in the world, and regards it as guiding man's relation to both good and evil, as well as governing his sentiments of love and hatred. Ortega y Gasset takes issue with Aquinas' approach to love, pointing out that desire-actuated love can only find consummation in appropriating its object, in effect in annihilating it finally. For Ortega y Gasset such an approach misses the point as to what true love is about, amounting as it does to an impoverishment of a most fecund, uplifting, if not ennobling sentiment.

When Ortega y Gasset criticizes Thomas of Aquinas’ view of love one realizes that, had he known Girard’s theory, he could as well have criticized it along the same lines:

“The idea of love that St. Thomas gives us, in summing up Greek tradition, is, obviously, erroneous. For him, love and hate are two forms of desire, appetite, or lust. Love is the desire for something good in so far as it is good — concupiscibile circa bonum; hate, a negative desire, a rejection of evil as such — concupiscibile circa malum. This reveals the confusion between appetites or desires and sentiments from which all psychology up to the eighteenth century suffered; a confusion which we again encounter in the Renaissance, though it is transferred to the realm of esthetics. Thus, Lorenzo the Magnificent says that I'amore e un appetito di bellezza.”…

“Nothing is so fertile in our private lives as the feeling of love; love even becomes the symbol of fertility. For many things are born out of a person's love: desire, thought, volition, action, All these things, however, which grow from love, like the harvest from a seed, are not love itself, but rather presuppose its existence. Of course, in some manner or form we also want what we love; but, on the other hand, we obviously want many things that we do not love, things which leave us indifferent on a sentimental plane. Desiring a good wine is not loving it, and the drug addict desires drugs at the same time that he hates them for their harmful effect.

“There is, however, another sounder and more subtle reason for distinguishing between love and desire. Desiring something is, without doubt, a move toward possession of that something ("possession" meaning that in some way or other the object should enter our orbit and become part of us). For this reason, desire automatically dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction. Love, on the other hand, is eternally unsatisfied. Desire has a passive character; when I desire something, what I actually desire is that the object come to me. Being the center of gravity, I await things to fall down before me. Love… is the exact reverse of desire, for love is all activity. Instead of the object coming to me, it is I who go to the object and become part of it. In the act of love, the person goes out of himself. Love is perhaps the supreme activity which nature affords anyone for going out of himself toward something else. It does not gravitate toward me, but I toward it.

“St. Augustine, one of those who have thought about love most profoundly and who possessed perhaps one of the most gigantic erotic temperaments that ever existed, succeeds sometimes in freeing himself from the interpretation which makes of love a desire or appetite. Thus, he says with lyric expansiveness: Amor meus, pondus meum: illo feror, quocumque feror. "My love is my weight; where it goes I go." Love is a gravitation toward that which is loved.”…

“[I]n love we feel united with the object. What does this union mean? It is not merely physical union, or even closeness. Perhaps our friend (friendship must not be forgotten when love is generically considered) lives far away and we do not hear from him. Nevertheless, we are with him in a symbolic union — our soul seems to expand miraculously, to clear the distance, and no matter where he is, we feel that we are in essential communion with him.”…

“Love.. reaches out to the object… and is involved in an invisible but divine task, the most active kind that there is: it is involved in the affirmation of its object. Think of what it is to love art or your country: it consists of never doubting for an instant their right to exist; it is like recognizing and confirming at each moment that they are worthy of existence.”

“The reader will judge whether or not my analysis matches what he finds within himself.” – says Ortega y Gasset. Many if not most of us will say, “yes, it largely matches my (past) experience.” Of course those very same people would certainly recognize themselves in Girard’s descriptions of mimetic desire, including those that bear on intense romantic feelings. Could the relevant accounts, as contained, e.g., in Deceit, Desire and the Novel, or in A Theater of Envy, however, be called accounts of love as it is elucidated by Ortega y Gasset from what he himself implies to be a phenomenological perspective?

The Girardian mimetic desire-based love not only cannot be spontaneous – it is mimetically instigated – but it “automatically dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction,” to repeat Ortega’s description of desire, which he recognizes as intrinsically acquisitive. Unless, says Girard, there appears a mediator to revivify it. But is that all that there is to it?

Mimetic theory can’t help but evince some of the same problems when it is brought to bear on love of God. But that is also where Girard came closest to making a normative case for imitation, namely for loving imitation of Jesus as the model of nonviolence par excellence. Now according to mimetic theory the Christian’s love of Jesus cannot but be imitation of someone else’s love of Jesus, which in turn is their imitation of someone else’s love of Jesus, etc., which imitation is ultimately supposed to lead to and consist in imitating Jesus’ love of the Father. But again, is that all that there is to it? And what about the acquisitive aspect of mimesis? Mimetic theory fails to factor it in as regards the imitative love of God; although Jesus is regarded as an external mediator, the same cannot be really expected of all those whose love of Jesus Christians are supposed to imitate, even if they tried to pick and choose their mediators. Is the implied endless chain of imitation supposed to be capable – if it is not a case of circular argument – of nullifying the curse of possessiveness, or deflecting it somehow, that otherwise would have to mean that this love, actuated as it is by someone else’s desire, “dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction” (whatever it may mean with respect to a thusly mediated deity)? “Love, on the other hand, is eternally unsatisfied,” says Ortega y Gasset. Are we really misguided when we want to say amen to that?