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ROMANCE, THE SAVING REMNANT

By Michael Vincent Miller

Dec. 27, 1987

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THE NATURE OF LOVE Volume Three: The Modern World. By Irving Singer. 473 pp.
Illinois: The University of Chicago Press. $24.95.

IS love a sob in the molecules? A fusion of instinct with culture? The poetry of procreation?

A mode of self-discovery? Ultimate knowledge of another? A shadow in Plato's cave? An

arduous path to God? Thinkers and writers through the ages, from sonneteers to
ethologists, from novelists and theologians to psychiatrists and sociobiologists, have
declared for and against all these views. Of course these are merely ideas about love,
approximations to love, like statistical approximations to a curve, and never quite the thing
itself, which keeps eluding the grasp of our most yearning definitions. Or is love mainly an
idea? The subject can give rise to philosophical quandaries as well as personal ones, and the
best thing to do when you're in such a quandary might be to consult a philosopher.

This is what Irving Singer has done in his new book, ''The Nature of Love: The Modern
World.'' He has consulted Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Santayana, Sartre, Martin Buber and
Gabriel Marcel along with novelists and psychoanalysts. Mr. Singer is himself a philosopher.
He has already published two previous volumes on the history of love, the first ranging from
Plato to Martin Luther, while the second begins with medieval courtly love and ends with
the 19th-century Romantic movement. Along the way he has also added a sort of companion
manual, ''The Goals of Human Sexuality,'' which explores sensuality, passion and scientific
research into the orgasm.

Such concerns are charmingly old-fashioned, compared with those of most modern
philosophers, for in earlier times love and sex belonged almost as much to philosophy as to
poetry. Nevertheless, Mr. Singer is not entirely alone. Two of his colleagues, Robert C.
Solomon and Roger Scruton, have recently produced impressive books on, respectively, love
and sexual desire. And Michel Foucault, before he died, turned out three scholarly volumes
on the history of sexuality. Perhaps philosophy, like a return of the repressed, is at last
awakening from a long Cartesian or Baconian slumber, a preoccupation with science, logic
and ultimate certitude, to begin wrestling once again with the mysteries of being. Love,
after all, is ontological; it is Being in its most vivid state. One imagines the new ontologists,
''gloomy grammarians in golden gowns,'' in Wallace Stevens' phrase, frowning over the
wanton activities of Cupid. It would be a comic spectacle, were it not such a poignant
enterprise.

In the final volume of his trilogy, Mr. Singer steps into the modern world with a wistful
question: ''Does anyone still believe in romantic love?'' Given a century that has buffeted
and battered eros with sexual liberation, narcissism, behaviorism, singles bars, militant

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feminism, sex therapy surrogates, artificial insemination, computer dating services and,
most recently, a fatal virus, one feels tempted to reply, ''Only in a mood of desperate
nostalgia.''

A long immersion in the past may strengthen one's immunity to modern life. Mr. Singer is a
rare bird on the contemporary scene, a philosopher preoccupied with literature and steeped
in Platonism, two traditions that have always treated love seriously. He not only readily
confesses his own romanticism; he steadfastly refuses to give it up. For he sees romantic
love as a ''saving remnant, a viable and realistic conception of what is humanly possible.''
After passing through some bleak modern stretches, he emerges still an optimist about
romance, even in marriage. He regards love as an imaginative act, an almost spontaneous
bestowing of value on another, but he wants to root it in the sexiness of biology. Neither
idealist nor materialist, Mr. Singer puts himself forward as a pluralist of love.

Passion has led a checkered moral career in the West, and every era has treated it as a
mixed blessing. We tend at one moment to celebrate it as a state of blissful enlightenment
and to deplore it the next as something akin to psychosis or hectic disease. The authorities
on love Mr. Singer examines are often torn with ambivalence as they quarrel with the
relationship between love and sex. Plato himself sometimes announces that love and desire
are ultimately incompatible; at other times he resigns himself uneasily to their inevitable
coexistence. As Mr. Singer reminds us, Plato's vacillation establishes a conflict that persists
into the modern world. Western love has always been a history of warfare between body
and soul.

Like visiting professors dressed in tweeds, the soul and the body lecture us from Mr.
Singer's pages, disputing the respective virtues of idealism and realism. He is a man clearly
in love with ideas, so he unabashedly analyzes the history of love as a history of ideas. ''The
source of love,'' he wrote in Volume One, ''is not God or the libido; it is rather ideas about
love that have developed throughout the history of mankind.'' It's as if there would be no
love without our ideas about it. Love as an idea is gratuitous, speculative, dangerous,
impractical, Mr. Singer suggests. When we love, ''we take our life in our hands.'' This idea
comes close to the heroic task that the psychologist Ernest Becker describes in ''The Denial
of Death'': to reconcile the split in ourselves that comes from being an earthbound animal
with its head in the stars.

Yet Mr. Singer's concentration on love as an idea is limiting. There are too many ideas for
ideas' sake here and not enough ideology, which would frame ideas in their social and
economic texture. There is too much high culture, created by artists and intellectuals, and
not enough couplings in the grass roots, a sense of people feeling and doing as well as being
influenced by ideas. I suspect that this emphasis comes from the Platonic tone of his
thinking, even if he is not a philosophical Platonist. The writers who appear as spokesmen
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for (or against) modern love are an odd but intriguing assortment. Some are obvious, such
as Kierkegaard, D. H. Lawrence and Freud. Others strike one as interesting idiosyncrasies -
for instance, Proust, Shaw and Santayana. Though these last have much to tell us about
love, do they merit so large a hearing? And why are there no major women authors present
except Simone de Beauvoir?

In the chapter on Kierkegaard, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, Mr. Singer shows how these three
thinkers rejected the central romantic premise of the early industrial bourgeoisie: the
conversion of an idealized lust into an ethic for marriage, a middle-class attempt to
domesticate the neo-Platonist mysticism in courtly and romantic love. This, by the way, is a
premise that has caused untold damage to modern family stability, because it filled men and
women with extravagant expectations from marriage. Both Kierkegaard and Tolstoy went
on to seek an ideal for earthly love in love of God, hoping to resolve the dilemma that T. S.
Eliot later defined when he suggested that the sadness in Romantic poetry can be traced not
only to ''the fact that no human relations are adequate to human desires, but also to the
disbelief in any further object for human desires than that which, being human, fails to
satisfy them.''

THERE is a fascinating case made for Proust, even if the chapter on him is too long. Mr.
Singer calls Proust and Freud ''the two greatest opponents of Romantic theory,'' citing
Proust's narrator Marcel, who considers love ''a reciprocal torture.'' As though he were the
last romantic, Proust annihilates romantic idealism from within by pushing it to absurd
extremes: ''He is romanticism destroying itself.'' Freud, by contrast, demystified
romanticism by reducing it to naturalistic causes.

In Sartre's writings, one finds the absolute dead end of the romantic myth, the demise of any
hope that passionate union with a lover can produce self-knowledge or even deep
knowledge of another. Sartrean love is worse than blind, and sex is a form of violence, ''a
compendium of sadism and masochism.'' There are other existentialists, Mr. Singer notes,
who preach a much more hopeful sermon - Marcel and Buber, for example - but I think he is
right in letting Sartre prevail. In the Sartrean world, as in our own, the exercise of power is
at the heart of love. Beneath the surface of erotic urgency, under all the sentimentality, the
modern sensibility discovers a naked politics - raw power deployed to enhance or
aggrandize the self. Sexual desire, in this view, is at bottom a desire to seize control. Here
Sartre's precursor was Nietzsche, who called love ''wild avarice and injustice . . . the most
ingenuous expression of egoism'' parading as its opposite.

The gods of antiquity were often thought to be rapaciously cruel and random in taking their
sexual gratification. Love in our times may have more in common with them than with the
Platonized Christian idealism that flowed from the Middle Ages down to the 19th century.
Certainly our erotic vanguard has left romanticism far behind. With respect to love, Freud
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may not be our most pertinent ancestor after all. Though Mr. Singer praises him for giving
us the first developmental account of our ability to love, he goes on to show that the theory
of infantile sexuality is shot through with projections and logical fallacies that stem from
Freud's own idealization of sex. For all his efforts to be a scientific naturalist, Freud's quest,
Mr. Singer declares, shares something with Plato's - both attempt to find a ''universal
dynamism'' to explain all life processes. This emphasis connects Freud with the Romantic
movement's hopes, if not its sexual idealism. And in Freud's later work, the notion of
Thanatos, the death instinct, forever at war with Eros, is something like the last gasp of the
Wagnerian Liebestod.

Though Mr. Singer might not agree with me, I feel that the D. H. Lawrence who appears in
his pages, the writer of ''The Rainbow'' and ''Women in Love,'' is in some ways closer to us
in spirit than Freud is. Anna and Will make love in ''The Rainbow'' out of ''a sensuality
violent and extreme as death.'' By this Lawrence means something different from Eros
versus Thanatos; the love and the violent possession here amount to the same thing.
Lawrence understood clearly how Nietzschean (or Sartrean) love - love as a violent power
struggle - grew from the lover's fear of loss of self in the act of merging. The richness of
Lawrence's vision was that unlike Sartre, he didn't stop there. He denounced this as the
wrong kind of love, and offered instead a conception that he hoped would avoid the romantic
trap, in which the idealizing of blissful merging leads to an attempt to own the beloved's
soul.

After dealing with these haunted, far-reaching writers, Mr. Singer is disappointing,
surprisingly so, when he gets to his own proposals for successful intimacy in a chapter
called ''Toward a Modern Theory of Love.'' Though he does a persuasive job of describing
the give-and-take of companionship, caring and occasional intense sexual unions that might
predominate in a mutually satisfying love affair or marriage, he has somehow left out of the
picture the sheer terror that the mad cherub is also capable of inducing, a terror ''like a
stairway to the sea / Where down the blind are driven,'' as Edwin Arlington Robinson put it
in the final lines of his magnificent poem ''Eros Turannos.'' Today one wants a theory of love
to come to terms with love's close relative, anxiety. Yet no anxiety appears in Mr. Singer's
rather laborious if judicious distinctions among falling in love, being in love and staying in
love. Didn't the writers he discusses - Lawrence, Freud and Sartre prominent among them -
get deeply enough under his skin? The pervasive presence of anxiety gives modern
intimacy its peculiar flavor. SEXUAL loving is filled with - to borrow the title of a book on a
quite different topic by the British psychoanalyst Michael Balint - ''thrills and regressions.''
The longings and gratifications of sex point to the infant's world with its merged, dependent
states of being. But this also suggests an undoing of what has been gained en route to
adulthood. It is no accident that we speak of ''falling in love.'' One might land in paradise or
experience annihilation. The greatest lovers throughout history, actual and fictive, have
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risked all - social conventions, moral codes, the self - and more often than not, they died in
the attempt: Paris and Helen, Antony and Cleopatra, Heloise and Abelard, Romeo and
Juliet, Tristram and Isolde.

Despite Mr. Singer's long and earnest labor, his broad scholarship and his scrupulous
fairness to both sides of every debate, the current volume, like its predecessors, suffers from
a problem that I suspect is inherent in its subject matter. It's the same dilemma that
confronts spouses and lovers when they try to analyze their feelings for each other. Love
just doesn't seem to stand up well under too much examination. The harder you look at it,
the more depressing it becomes, like an old pornographic movie in black and white.

His writing is at its best when, waxing more lyrical than philosophical, he surrenders to his
passion for his subject. Once in a while he leads up to a brilliant insight on a rhapsodic or
aphoristic swell of language. But more often, his style is that of the academician, more than
a little solemn and tendentious, nodding from the weight of not always inevitable
distinctions. I wonder, in a book on modern love, can you afford to leave out irony? Can you
write today about Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Lawrence and Sartre without introducing at least
some ironical blue notes? But Mr. Singer's high purpose seems for the most part to have
sedated his sense of the ironical. Still, his new book, along with the rest of his trilogy, is
important work, a kind of intellectual terrace from which we can survey the woods where
love might be glimpsed.

With the appearance of this third volume, Mr. Singer has written over 1,300 pages on love.
Yet for all the passionate learning and sturdy humanism, what he most reminds me of is a
medieval alchemist fuming over his alembics in search of the philosopher's stone, which will
change dross into gold. He hasn't found it, but perhaps that doesn't matter. Maybe the
search for love is as close as we can get to love. BEDTIME FOR PHILOSOPHERS

One imagines the poignant irony of the scholar's situation - sitting at a library cubicle,
surrounded by dusty volumes with yellowing pages, writing, of all things, about love.

Not so for Irving Singer. ''I don't write in a library; in fact, I don't even write at a desk
anymore. I write in bed, where I am comfortable, and dictate to my wife. She often disagrees
with what I say and we'll discuss it, and sometimes I incorporate her ideas. So it's really a
semicollaborative venture.''

But there is more than editorial feedback here. Mr. Singer, who is 62 years old, says his
marriage provided the emotional incentive to examine the concept of love. ''This, like so
many philosophical works, began as an attempt to understand my own inadequacies.
Everyone in my family persuaded me that I ought to be more loving, which troubled me.

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''So like most philosophers,'' he added wryly, ''I dealt with the criticism by constructing a
theory and a philosophy which enabled me to dismiss their ideas.''

If the emotional seeds came from his family, then the intellectual seeds were planted 30
years ago with his study of two authors in particular - Proust, whose outright rejection of
romantic love nagged at him, and Santayana, whom he admires for his philosophical
approach to literature.

''Santayana's writing taught me that different disciplines can be seen as variable products
of the imagination.

And in this project, I merge philosophy and literature and psychiatry and science. And I
finally come to terms with Proust, overcoming his negativism.''

While his new book is the last in a series, Mr. Singer said he would not abandon the topic of
love. ''In the trilogy I mainly deal with the concept of love in terms of its historical
development. I would like next to tackle a much more personal work, giving my own
systematic analysis more fully than I have so far.''

Mr. Singer, who has taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1958,
describes his own views as those of a ''reconstructed romantic.'' ''I don't believe in romantic
love in that it has to be sweet and painless.'' The best one can expect, he said, is
''meaningfulness with moments of real happiness.'' NANCY SHARKEY

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