How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [146]
a country life, loving itself, a beefsteak, or wine. In certain learned treatises, the motions of the heavenly bodies are said to be inspired by love; in others, angels and devils are differentiated by the quality of their love. And of course God is said to be Love.
Confronted with this enormous range of reference, how are we to state what the subject is that we are investigating?
Can we even be sure that there is a single subject? When one person says "I love cheese," and another says "I love football,"
and a third says "I love mankind," are they all three using the word in any sense that is common? After all, one eats cheese but not football or mankind, one plays football but not cheese or mankind, and whatever "I love mankind" means, that meaning does not seem to be applicable to cheese or football. And yet all three do use the same word. Is there in fact some deep reason for that, some reason that is not immediately apparent on the surface? Difficult as that question is, can we say that we have identified the "same subject" until we have answered it?
Faced with this chaotic situation, you may decide to limit the enquiry to human love-to love between human beings, of the same sex or different sexes, of the same age or different ages, and so forth. That would rule out the three statements we have just discussed. But you would still find, even if you read only a small portion of the available books about the subject, a very great range of reference. You would find, for instance, that love is said by some writers to consist wholly in acquisitive desire, usually sexual desire; that is, love is merely a name for the attraction that almost all animals feel toward members of the opposite sex. But you would also find other authors who maintain that love, properly speaking, contains no acquisitive desire whatever, and consists in pure benevolence. Do acquisitive desire and benevolence have anything in common, considering that acquisitive desire always implies wanting some good for oneself, while benevolence implies wanting a good for someone else?
At least acquisitive desire and benevolence share· a com-312 HOW TO READ A BOOK
mon note of tendency, of desire in some very abstract sense of the term. But your investigation of the literature of the subject would soon uncover writers who conceive of the essence of love as being cognitive rather than appetitive. Love, these writers maintain, is an intellectual act, not an emotional one. In other words, knowing that another person is admirable always preceeds desiring him or her, in either of the two senses of desire.
Such authors do not deny that desire enters into the picture, but they do deny that desire should be called love.
Let us suppose-in fact, we think it can be done-that you are able to identify some common meaning in these various conceptions of human love. Even then not all of your problems are solved. Consider the ways in which love manifests itself between and among human beings. Is the love that a man and woman have for each other the same when they are courting as when they are married, the same when they are in their twenties as when they are in their seventies? Is the love that a woman has for her husband the same as that she has for her children? Does a mother's love for her children change as they grow up? Is the love of a brother for his sister the same as his love for his father? Does a child's love for its parents change as he or she grows? Is the love that a man has for a woman, either his wife or some other, the same as the friendship he feels for another man, and does it make a diference what relationship he has with the man-such as one with whom he goes