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Why Logical Fallacies Work

The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787).
The Death of Socrates, by Jacques-Louis David (1787). Plato believed that bad arguments had condemned his teacher to death, inspiring Aristotle’s search for the principles of sound reasoning.

History is full of brilliant minds who believed false things and defended absurd ideas. Isaac Newton spent decades trying to create the philosopher’s stone. Thomas Edison championed radioactive products as remedies for various ailments. Steve Jobs skipped bathing in the conviction that his vegan diet could cleanse his body of mucus and toxins.

The problem is not that intelligent people cannot think.

It is that they are human.

We all have hopes, fears, loyalties, ambitions, prejudices, and desires. We are naturally drawn to arguments that flatter our opinions, excuse our behaviour, or confirm our suspicions.

More than two thousand years ago, the ancient Greeks began studying arguments that were unsound and yet persuasive, calling them fallacies.

Learning to recognise them remains one of philosophy’s most practical lessons. But more interesting than what they are is how they work.

Why Bad Arguments Persuade Us

Most fallacies succeed not because they overwhelm our intelligence, but because they appeal to our human nature and frailties.

We are more receptive to arguments that confirm what we already believe than to those that ask us to change our minds. We welcome arguments that flatter our side, condemn our opponents, simplify a complicated world, or promise certainty where none exists.

Reason is less often an impartial judge than a disingenuous lawyer, excelling at defending conclusions that we reached for wholly other reasons.

And, sadly, the brighter the mind, the more elaborate—and persuasive—its rationalisations.

From Rhetoric to Logic

The study of fallacies emerged in ancient Greece as a branch of rhetoric, the art and science of persuasive speaking.

Following the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BCE, Athens became a radically participatory democracy. Citizens served as jurors, debated laws, and competed for influence not with swords but with words.

Sophists such as Gorgias, Protagoras, and Hippias enriched themselves by teaching this new art of persuasion. Gorgias was not merely a teacher of rhetoric, but a performer, master of verbal display, and intellectual celebrity. According to tradition, when he appeared in the theatre at Athens, he would invite the audience: “Come, propose me a theme.” He took pride in his ability to speak on any subject and defend even the most improbable of positions.

For Plato, this represented a profound problem. It had been by bad arguments that his teacher, Socrates, had been put to death. If persuasive speech could triumph over truth, what hope could there be for philosophy?

Plato’s pupil Aristotle sought to address these concerns by laying the foundations of logic.

If rhetoric explains how people are persuaded, logic asks when they ought to be.

Formal and Informal Fallacies

Logic distinguishes two broad kinds of fallacy: formal and informal.

A fallacy is a defect in an argument, whether accidental or deliberate.

Formal fallacies arise from the structure of an argument.

If I have the flu, then I have a fever.
I have a fever.
Therefore, I have the flu.

The conclusion, of course, does not follow, since I may have any number of other pyrogenic (fever-inducing) illnesses.

This formal fallacy is known as affirming the consequent.

Far more common are informal fallacies, whose weakness lies not in their logical form but in their content.

These are the fallacies that fill newspaper columns, political debates, boardrooms, dinner tables, and social media.

We Prefer People to Arguments

The easiest way to answer an argument is often not to answer it at all.

Instead, attack the person making it.

This is the ad hominem fallacy.

Closely related are the genetic fallacy, which judges an argument by its source, and the appeal to hypocrisy (tu quoque), which dismisses an argument because its author fails to live by it.

None addresses the argument itself.

They succeed because judging people is easier than judging ideas.

A striking example of the genetic fallacy came during the 2016 Brexit referendum. On 3 June 2016, the then Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, declared: ‘The people in this country have had enough of experts…’

We Prefer Easy Victories

Some arguments are difficult to refute.

It is then much easier to invent a weaker one.

A straw man caricatures an opponent’s position before knocking it down.

Closely related is the red herring, which changes the subject altogether.

Neither brings us closer to the truth, but both bring us closer to victory.

Some regard straw man as a form of red herring, since both serve to deflect. ‘Red herring’ takes its name from the custom of using stinky smoked herring to throw dogs off a trail. Think of it as a form of pre-Internet trolling.

For example:

—Critical appraisal of the new Bordeaux vintage would be more objective and meaningful if the wines could be tasted blind.

—Just Bordeaux?

We Prefer Agreement

Human beings are social animals.

This makes us especially vulnerable to social arguments.

An appeal to popularity asks us to believe something because many other people believe it.

An argument to moderation assures us that the middle position must be right.

A false dilemma presents only two options when reality usually offers many more.

These fallacies appeal to our desire for belonging, certainty, and simplicity.

False dilemma is often a veiled attempt to force a Hobson’s choice of ‘take it or leave it’. For example, Theresa May insisted: ‘It’s my deal or no deal.’ At times, she expanded this into a false trilemma: ‘It’s my deal, no deal, or no Brexit at all.’

We Prefer Simple Stories

The human mind delights in finding patterns—so much so that it finds them where none exist.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc (‘with this, therefore because of this’) mistakes correlation for causation.

The gambler’s fallacy imagines that independent events, like a throw of dice, somehow remember what came before.

Both satisfy our hunger for neat explanations in a messy world.

Cum hoc ergo propter hoc is also known as the Chanticleer fallacy after the fictional rooster who believed that his crowing made the sun rise. I prefer to think of it as the scientist’s fallacy.

We Prefer Being Right

Perhaps the most bone-headed fallacy of all is begging the question.

Instead of proving a conclusion, it quietly assumes it.

For example, the argument that opposes same-sex marriage on the grounds that marriage is the union between a man and a woman is no more substantial than ‘I’m right because I’m right.’

Circular arguments persuade because they begin where we already stand.

The Discipline of Thinking Clearly

This article may have seemed to be about reasoning.

It has really been about self-deception.

Logical fallacies endure because they satisfy our desires more readily than they satisfy the demands of reason.

We rarely believe bad arguments because we cannot think.

More often, we believe them because they tell us what we wanted to hear.

Learning to recognise fallacies in others is useful.

Learning to recognise them in ourselves is the beginning of self-knowledge.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this introduction to logical fallacies, you’ll find many more practical lessons on reasoning and rhetoric in How to Think Like Plato and Speak Like Cicero.

To explore the forces that so often lead us astray, see Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception.

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Why Friendship Is Essential to a Good Life

Plato and Aristotle, detail from Raphael's School of Athens.
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.

We have never had so many ways of connecting with other people, and yet so few close friends.

Many of us have hundreds or even thousands of online contacts, but no one we could call in the middle of the night. We move cities, change jobs, change partners, and change phones without thinking twice, and our friendships often prove just as disposable.

Aristotle would have regarded this not merely as a social problem, but as a human tragedy.

‘Without friends,’ he writes in the Nicomachean Ethics, ‘no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’

It is a remarkable claim.

Most of us think that, given enough money, success, health, freedom, and comfort, we could muddle along well enough on our own. Aristotle thought otherwise. Friendship is not simply one of life’s pleasures. It is one of its necessities.

Why We Need Friends

The ancient Greeks had several words for love, including eros for passionate or romantic love, and philia (the root of ‘bibliophile’ and ‘anglophile’) for friendship.

For Aristotle, philia is a virtue which is ‘most necessary with a view to living … for without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.’ 

Philia underpins not only personal happiness but the very health of the state. Friendship fosters trust, cooperation, generosity, forbearance, and even justice—for when friendship exists, justice is scarcely needed.

But friendship is not simply for enjoying and getting along. In its highest form, it is a vehicle of virtue, helping us to become better people.

The Three Forms of Friendship

Aristotle begins with a broad or minimal concept of philia. For one person to be friends with another, it is necessary, simply, ‘that [they] bear good will to each other, without this escaping their notice’.

A person may bear goodwill to another for one of three reasons: that they are useful; that they are pleasant; or that they are good—that is, rational and virtuous.

Friendships of utility are based on mutual advantage. We enjoy one another’s company because each has something to offer the other. Such friendships are common in business, politics, and everyday life, and there is nothing wrong with them. But remove the advantage, and they usually disappear.

Friendships of pleasure are based on enjoyment. We like another person’s wit, humour, charm, or shared interests. These friendships are especially common among the young, whose lives are often governed more by feeling than by settled character. They, too, tend to fade as tastes and circumstances change.

The highest form of friendship is based not on usefulness or pleasure, but on virtue. ‘Perfect friendship’, says Aristotle, is ‘the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue.’

Perfect friends are drawn to each other not because they expect anything in return, but because they genuinely admire and value one another’s character. They love their friend not for what he has or provides, but for who he is. 

Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of their nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good—and goodness is an enduring thing … And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it in all the qualities that friends should have.

Another Self

A perfect friend, says Aristotle, is ‘another self’.

This does not mean someone who merely resembles us or always agrees with us. It means someone who cares enough, or is noble enough, to disagree with us and challenge us.

A true friend shares our deepest values, but also helps us to live up to them. We become better not by admiring virtue from afar, but by practising it together. Friendship is not merely the reward of virtue; it is one of the principal ways in which virtue is cultivated.

Every act of friendship is also an exercise in virtue. In being patient with our friend, we become more patient ourselves. In speaking honestly, we become more honest. In encouraging what is best in another person, we strengthen what is best in ourselves. Our good and their good are no longer competing like fishmongers: each one’s happiness adds to that of the other. We become, in the deepest sense, another self.

We may find an illustration of this ideal in Plato’s Phaedrus. Socrates and Phaedrus spend an afternoon walking in the Attic countryside while reflecting on the soul, love, and the art of persuasion. Their friendship is grounded not merely in pleasure, but in a shared pursuit of truth. At the end of their conversation, Phaedrus responds to Socrates’ prayer with the simple request: ‘Ask the same for me, for friends should have all things in common.’ Whether or not Aristotle had this dialogue in mind, it beautifully embodies his conception of perfect friendship.

Why Friendship Is Rare

Unfortunately, perfect friendship is uncommon.

First, it requires good character, and good character is itself uncommon. Second, it demands something that has always been scarce and may never have been scarcer than today: time.

Friendship cannot be hurried.

People only come to know one another by sharing experiences, surviving disappointments, forgiving offences, and gradually learning that they can be trusted. Like character itself, friendship grows slowly.

We live in a culture that prizes speed, convenience, novelty, and consumer choice. Relationships, like everything else, are expected to fit around our schedules and satisfy our needs. Friendship asks something very different of us. It requires attention, loyalty, respect, forbearance, and sometimes considerable sacrifice.

The Courage to Be Known

There is another difficulty.

Many of us have become so unaccustomed to genuine friendship that, when we encounter its possibility, we instinctively retreat from it.

A true friend is not simply someone who makes us feel better. He knows us. He sees through our pretences. He notices when we deceive ourselves. He quietly expects us to become better than we are.

That can be deeply unsettling.

We often say that we want people to accept us exactly as we are. Aristotle might have replied that a friend accepts us as we are while refusing to leave us there.

Perhaps that is why perfect friendship is so rare. It demands not only affection, but humility; not only loyalty, but the willingness to be changed.

Nowadays, it is all too easy to retreat into comfortable mediocrity.

Friendship and Happiness

Throughout the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that happiness lies not in pleasure or success, but in living according to reason and virtue.

Friendship is one of the principal ways in which this becomes possible.

A good friend encourages what is best in us, restrains what is worst, and accompanies us in the long and difficult work of becoming the person we are capable of being. If we abandon a true friend, really, it is our own self that we are abandoning.

We tend to think of friendship as one of life’s pleasures.

Aristotle thought of it as one of life’s disciplines.

A good friend does not simply make us happier.

He helps us become better and bigger.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this article on Aristotle’s philosophy of friendship, you’ll find much more in The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, which examines the lives, ideas, and enduring influence of the three greatest philosophers of antiquity.

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How Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle Reimagined Happiness

The Death of Socrates, by David.

We all say we want to be happy, but the pursuit of happiness often seems like a wild goose chase.

Maybe the problem is not so much with us, or the world we live in, but with the very concept of happiness.

The ancient Greeks had a much better concept. They called it eudaimonia, literally ‘good soul’, ‘good spirit’, or ‘good god’.

Although Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle understood eudaimonia in somewhat different ways, they all regarded it as the highest good, often even the very aim and purpose of philosophy.

What Is Eudaimonia?

Eudaimonia is often translated from Greek simply as ‘happiness’—but that is very misleading. The word ‘happy’, which is related to ‘happen’ and ‘perhaps’, derives from the Norse happ for ‘chance’, ‘fortune’, or ‘luck’. From Irish to Greek, most European words for ‘happy’ originally meant something like ‘lucky’—one exception being Welsh, in which it originally meant ‘wise’.

Another word for ‘happy’ or ‘fortunate’ in Old English is gesælig, which, over the centuries, morphed into our ‘silly’.

Eudaimonia, in contrast, is anything but silly. It has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with hard work. It is a much deeper, fuller, and richer concept than happiness, sometimes articulated in terms of flourishing or living a life that is worthwhile or fulfilling.

Many philosophical schools in antiquity thought of eudaimonia as the highest good, although schools such as Epicureanism and Stoicism conceived of it in somewhat different terms.

What can be said is that, unlike happiness, eudaimonia is not an emotion but a state of being—or even, especially for Aristotle, a state of doing. As such, it is more stable and reliable, and cannot so easily be taken away from us. Although it leads to pleasure or satisfaction of the deepest kind, it does not come from pleasure, but is according to higher values and principles that transcend the here and now.

The idea of eudaimonia evolved over time, especially across the three generations that separated Socrates, via Plato, from Aristotle—the three greatest philosophers of antiquity.

Socrates on Eudaimonia

Socrates, from what we can tell (mainly from his student Plato), equated eudaimonia with wisdom and virtue. In the Greater Alcibiades, he says that he who is not wise cannot be happy; in the Gorgias, that nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man; and in the Meno, that everything the soul endeavours or endures under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness.

In the Apology, at his trial, Socrates gives a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth, reputation, and honour as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul. ‘Wealth,’ he says, ‘does not bring about excellence, but excellence makes wealth and everything else good for men, both individually and collectively.’

Socrates provided the ultimate proof of his principle that ‘nothing truly bad can ever happen to a good man’. When the jurors condemned him to death, they only made him and his ideas immortal—and he did all he could not to prevent that from happening. 

Plato on Eudaimonia

Plato was inspired by the example of Socrates. In the Republic, Plato’s brother Glaucon argues that most people are fundamentally selfish, but maintain a reputation for virtue and justice to evade the social costs of being or appearing unjust. But if a man could get hold of the mythical Ring of Gyges and make himself invisible, he would most surely behave as it suited him:

No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a god among men.

We behave justly not because we value justice, but because we are weak and fearful; while the unjust man who is cunning enough to seem just will get the better of everyone and everything.

As part of his lengthy reply to Glaucon, Plato famously conjures up an idealised Republic to help him ‘locate’ (define) justice, first in the state and then in the individual. Plato argues that justice and injustice are to the soul as health and disease are to the body: If health in the body is intrinsically desirable, then so too is justice in the soul. For Plato, an unjust man cannot be happy because he is not in rational and ordered control of himself.

Aristotle embraced much of Plato’s account, but gave eudaimonia a broader and more practical meaning.

Aristotle on Eudaimonia

It is with Plato’s one-time student Aristotle and his Nicomachean Ethics that the concept of eudaimonia is most closely associated.

For Aristotle, a thing is best understood by looking at its end, purpose, or goal. For example, the purpose of a knife is to cut, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what a knife is; the goal of medicine is good health, and it is by seeing this that one best understands what medicine is, or ought to be.

Now, if one does this for some time, it soon becomes apparent that some goals are subordinate to other goals, which are themselves subordinate to yet other goals. For example, a medical student’s goal may be to qualify as a doctor, but this goal is subordinate to her goal to heal the sick, which is itself subordinate to her goal to make a living by doing something useful. This could go on and on, but unless the medical student has a goal that is an end in itself, nothing that she does is actually worth doing.

What, asks Aristotle, is this goal that is an end in itself? This ‘supreme good’, he replies, is eudaimonia, and eudaimonia only.

But what exactly does Aristotle mean by eudaimonia?

For Aristotle, it is by understanding the distinctive function of a thing that one can understand its essence. Thus, one cannot understand what it is to be a gardener unless one can understand that the distinctive function of a gardener is ‘to tend to a garden with a certain degree of skill’.

Whereas human beings need nourishment like plants, and have sentience like animals, their distinctive function, says Aristotle, is their unique and god-like capacity to reason. Thus, our supreme good is to lead a life that enables us to use and develop our reason, and that is in accordance with reason.

By living our life to the full according to our essential nature as rational beings, we are bound to flourish, that is, to develop and express our full human potential, regardless of the ebb and flow of our good or bad fortune.

To put this in modern terms, if we develop our thinking skills, if we guard against lies and self-deception, if we train and master our emotions, we will, over the years, make better and better choices, do more and more meaningful things, and derive ever-increasing satisfaction from all that we have become and all that we have done, and are yet able to do.

Although Aristotle’s account proved the most influential, his was not the last word on the matter. The Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics all regarded eudaimonia as the highest good, although they conceived of it in somewhat different terms. For the Cynics and Stoics, happiness depended less on flourishing than on living in accordance with nature and reason, and on cultivating an inner freedom that no amount of bad fortune could destroy. The Epicureans sought tranquillity through moderation, friendship, and freedom from unnecessary desires, while the Skeptics argued that peace of mind arises from suspending judgement about matters that cannot be known with certainty.

In recent decades, philosophers and psychologists have rediscovered eudaimonia as an alternative to the modern pursuit of pleasure or subjective happiness. Increasingly, they recognise that a good life depends not only on how we feel, but also on how we live.

‘Happiness’ is something that comes and goes. It is at the mercy of fortune and circumstance. A life well lived, however, is a treasure that no one and nothing can ever take away from you, and that will shine in the eyes of others long after you are dead.

Continue Exploring

If you enjoyed this history of eudaimonia, you’ll find much more in The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, which explores the lives, ideas, and enduring influence of the three greatest philosophers of antiquity.

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A psychiatrist and philosopher interprets the Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.

Orpheus and Eurydice, by Edward Poynter.

The earliest mentions of the supreme musician Orpheus date to the sixth century BCE. By the fourth century BCE, Plato was already commenting on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Today, the fullest accounts survive in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The Story

Apollo gave his son Orpheus a lyre of gold and tortoise shell. Orpheus mastered the instrument so completely that no creature, and scarcely nature itself, could resist his playing and singing: the animals of the forest gathered around him, the trees bent toward him, and the streams and rivers came out of their beds to greet him.

Orpheus fell head over heels for Eurydice, and she readily returned his love. Hymen, the god of marriage ceremonies, presided over their wedding, but, in a terrible omen, his torch spluttered and spat and marred the feast with bitter fumes.

Eurydice ventured into the nearby woods, where the shepherd Aristaeus espied her dancing with the dryads. Enraptured by the scene, he began to chase her. As she beat back through the bushes, she tripped on a nest of vipers and died from a snakebite to the heel.

Orpheus sang of his grief from earth to heaven, moving the gods and all of creation. So empty did life seem without Eurydice that he resolved to go and see her in Hades—and, if possible, return her to the land of the living.

Orpheus entered Hades through a cave of poisonous vapours and, by his lyrical song, made it unhindered to the palace of King Hades and Queen Persephone. His lament entranced the ferryman Charon and the ordinarily fierce three-headed hound Cerberus, and even Hades himself, who, for the first and last time, shed a black and sooty tear.

With Persephone leaning heavily upon him, Hades declared that Orpheus could leave with Eurydice, as long as he did not look at her until they had both crossed into the land of the living—but should he break this one condition, Eurydice would forever remain in the underworld, where few of the living can enter, and none twice.

Orpheus led Eurydice back the way he came, resisting the urge to turn around and meet her doe eyes.

Then he realised that he could no longer hear her footsteps behind him, and began to fear that Hades had tricked him.

As soon as he saw the light of the sun, he glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed his beloved. But Eurydice had not yet crossed the threshold and was whipped back in a whirl into the bowels of the Earth.

Orpheus sat in a clearing and played mournfully on his lyre, spurning the many maidens who called upon him. According to Ovid, he was “the first of the Thracian people to transfer his love to young boys.” The scorned women threw sticks and stones at him, which fell back to the ground at the sound of his mesmerizing music. In the end, the Maenads, in a state of Dionysian frenzy, tore him apart from limb to limb.

Orpheus’ lyre and dismembered head, still dolefully singing, floated down the River Haebrus to the sea and washed up on the isle of Lesbos, which became famed for its poets. The Muses found his head and buried it in a cave, over which the nightingales sang more prettily than in any other part.

As for his lyre, it can still be seen in the constellation Lyra.

Interpretation

Orpheus is a personification of music, poetry, and art in general. In modern times, he has inspired countless paintings, poems, novels, ballets, operas, and films. More curiously, he became the patron of an ancient religious cult called Orphism.

In Plato’s Symposium, Phaedrus says that, rather than a great man, Orpheus was, in fact, a coward. In arguing that the mark of true love is the readiness to die for it, Phaedrus contrasts the chicanery of Orpheus in seeking to cheat death to be reunited with Eurydice with the willingness of Alcestis to lay down her life for her husband Admetus when not even his elderly parents would do so. Alcestis was permitted to return alive from Hades, a rare reward indeed, whereas Orpheus returned empty-handed to be torn apart by women.

Although Orpheus traveled through Hades like a hero, he missed the mark of a hero. His anxious doubting, his turning to boys, and his being torn apart by women all point, in the Ancient Greek mind, to a lack of virility.

The gaze objectifies the beloved: If Orpheus had truly loved Eurydice, he would not have needed to look back upon her. Indeed, he would readily have died to be reunited with her and would never have found himself in such a predicament.

The descent into the nether regions, or katabasis, is found in mythologies from all over the world. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is strikingly similar to the Japanese myth of Izanagi and Izanami: Izanagi travels to the underworld to retrieve his wife Izanami, who warns him not to look at her. But so ardent is his desire that he lights a torch and casts his gaze upon her, only for it to be met by a rotting corpse.

By blurring the line between life and death, the katabasis explores themes of mortality and immortality. It is, by extension, a means of explaining natural cycles, especially the cycle of the seasons and the cycle of life, as symbolized also by the viper that undid Eurydice.

We might wonder whether Eurydice, beautiful but not much else, is something of a MacGuffin: an insignificant or irrelevant quest object that serves merely to motivate the adventure, like the Holy Grail in Arthurian legend or the ring in Lord of the Rings.

Far more fully realised than Eurydice is the power of art itself. No one and nothing remained unmoved by Orpheus’ song. For all his might, Hercules did not travel so easily through Hades. Even after his death, Orpheus’ severed head continued to sing, suggesting that art, besides being powerful, is immortal.

With such a gift, Orpheus had far more than most to be happy and, better than happy, useful. Yet he squandered it all for the mortal Eurydice, unable to understand that, for all her beauty, she was, like Izanami, never more than a decaying corpse.

How much better for him, and for all, if he had learnt to be happy on his own or with his one true love, music.

Instead of looking back on Eurydice, he ought to have been looking ahead, like a real hero, paying no heed to his own selfish, self-absorbed, self-indulgent happiness—the kind of happiness that, like Eurydice, dies in the moment that it is held.

Continue exploring myth

If you enjoyed this interpretation of Orpheus and Eurydice, you’ll find many more like it in The Meaning of Myth.

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What the History of Love Reveals About Love Itself

The Sacrifice of Isaac, by the one and only Caravaggio

Many of us expect love to do far more than make us happy. We expect it to make us whole, to tell us who we are, and even to give our lives meaning. This understanding of love is surprisingly recent.

Love is a word with a meaning that has changed over the centuries. Today, we tend to think about love primarily in terms of romantic love. But, if you consider it, the concept of romantic love barely features among the 66 books of the Bible. The two greatest “love” stories in the Bible are not of husband and wife, nor even of man and woman, but of man and man, and woman and woman: David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi.

When Love Belonged to God

Instead, all love in the Bible is directed at God, and the love for the spouse, and more generally for the other, is subsumed under the love of God, of which it is an expression. Thus, in the Sacrifice of Isaac, Abraham’s love for God trumps his love for his own longed-for son Isaac, whom he is willing to sacrifice for no other reason than that God commanded it.

In ancient times, people did sometimes fall in love, but they did not believe that their love might in some sense save them, as we tend to today.

When, in the Iliad, Helen eloped with Paris, sparking the Trojan War, neither she nor he (nor anyone else) conceived of their attraction as pure or ennobling or exalting. When, in the Aeneid, Dido fell in love with Aeneas, Virgil portrays her love as a kind of divine affliction that distracts both lovers from their duties and ends in ruin and death. One might also think of Phaedra and Hippolytus, Medea and Jason, and Antony and Cleopatra.

The Rise of Romantic Love

But over the centuries, the sacred seeped out of God and into romantic love, which came to take the place of the retreating religion in lending purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives. People had once loved God, but now they loved love: more than with their beloved, they fell in love with love itself.

\Abraham had surrendered himself and Isaac out of love for God. But in the Romantic era, around the time of the French Revolution, love grew into quite the opposite: a means of finding and validating oneself, of lending texture, substance, and solidity to one’s life—as encapsulated by Sylvester’s 1978 hit, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real), the final kissing scene in Cinema Paradiso, the “You complete me” scene in Jerry Maguire, and countless other popular songs and films.

In the time of God, “finding oneself”—or, more accurately, losing oneself in God—had demanded years of patient spiritual practice. But after the French Revolution, romantic love could come to the rescue of anyone, with very little effort or sacrifice on their part. Being saved became a simple matter of luck.

If love is a word with a meaning that has changed over time, it is also a word with multiple meanings, one that points at a diversity of distinct concepts with only a family resemblance between them.

What All Love Has in Common

Unlike us, the Greeks had several words for love, enabling them to distinguish more clearly between the different types. For example, eros referred to sexual or passionate love; philia to friendship; storge to familial love; and agape to universal love, such as the love for strangers, nature, or God.

Having many more words for “love” enables us to think and talk about love in new and different ways. For example, we might say that people in the early stages of a romantic relationship often expect unconditional storge, but find only the hunger and dependency of eros, and, if they are lucky, the maturity and fertility of philia. Or, like Plato, we might say that the best kind of philia is one that is born of eros, and that in turn feeds back into eros to strengthen and develop it, transforming it from a lust for possession into an impulse for philosophy.

But if we are to understand the deep meaning of the word “love,” then we need to uncover what all these different types of love have in common. In other words, what is it that unites eros, philia, storge, and agape? What is the common element that makes them all types of love?

What all these instances of love have in common, I think, is a reaching out beyond our own being to things that are able to lend purpose, weight, and meaning to our lives, even to the point of ingesting or incorporating those things into our inner being—whence the hug, the love bite, and the sacramental bread and wine of the Eucharist.

Love is the force of nature that enables us to cross the boundary between ourselves and the world, like the lobster, to shed our shell and grow beyond it—which is why people with little love are so small.