In love, we like to use great words. We promise to love each other 'forever' and praise the beloved as nothing less than 'the one' . Meanwhile, we know very well that we don't live eternally and that we may find our 'true love' one day on the opposite side of the divorce table. So why do we continue to use such grand words? Is there perhaps a deeper truth in the seemingly absurd promise of infinite love between finite human beings? Doctoral researcher Errol Boon has written an essay on that question.
'As a philosopher, you are always concerned with love,' says Boon. 'Philosophy literally means "love of wisdom", but perhaps it also always involves a "wisdom of love", as Levinas once said. For many philosophers, reflection on love is an integral part of their work - at least, as a self-reflection on their work as philosophers. I have been preoccupied with it philosophically for some time now, although this is the first time I have written an essay about it.'
The mystery of the other
In his essay, Boon discusses the way we use concepts of time to express love. 'Within relationships, especially since the ideal of the love-based marriage emerged, we rely on an idiom of eternity to express our amatory passions. We say things like: "I will love you forever", "I will never leave you" and "you are everything to me." At first glance, this is of course highly irrational. How can you, as a finite human being, promise infinite love? In the article, I have asked myself whether such a promise can still be meaningful and emancipatory.'
According to Boon, the answer lies in what he calls 'the enigma of the other'. 'In romantic love, we are faced with a paradox. On the one hand, we have the idea that we know the other person particularly well: no one knows them as well as you do. At the same time, the other person always remains a mystery, someone you can't know completely, precisely because you love them. Especially in the consciousness of the person who is in love, that mystery of the other becomes something enchantingly great. It is precisely when we get to know someone intimately that we discover that we do not know them. Love thus arises from knowing what you don't know.'
The wonder of love
Such an ungraspable feeling calls for grand language, Boon argues, because it is that very grandeur that can accommodate the indeterminacy of the mystery. A sentence such as 'I will love you forever' should therefore not be interpreted as an assertation about an expected reality, but as a way of expressing the inexpressibility of an experienced passionate necessity. Boon: 'When we utter such a sentence, what we are really saying is that our feelings are ineffable. If you cannot express your feelings, you can at least express their inexpressibility. Love is conceived as a kind of miracle which, by definition, can never be explained discursively.'
The same inexpressibility is found in such a concept as 'the one'. Boon: 'The moment you could fully explain or know why you are attracted to that other person, it is actually over. When a friend of mine was once madly in love, he told me that there had been no one in his life whom he had studied and thought about as much as his beloved. Yet every day when he woke up next to her, he wondered anew who she actually was. I believe that this insatiable lack of knowledge lies at the core of erotic desire. As soon as that disappears, love is over.'
'When we use a concept such as "the one", we are expressing our desire to be with that one unique person. Then, I say, it is that person, and that person only, who is the only destination of these most private feelings that are governing me at this particular moment in time. It is precisely this hyper-particularity that makes love elusive to general concepts, yet adequate for indeterminate terms, which express precisely that sense of someone being blissfuly unknowable'.
