Can we raise our Loves: the answers of Kant, Caroline Norton and Pico della Mirandola

And yet when thou are absent I am sad;
And envy even the bright blue sky above thee,
Whose quiet stars may see thee and be glad.
Caroline Norton, I do not love thee

Love does not depend on our will. We can’t love an unknown person, a particular woman or man or thing by the command of our reason, or by the order of someone. We don’t love by request. Love is spontaneous. It exists or not. It outstrips our intentions.

This is the current view. But is it exactly like that? Isn’t this a rather romantic view of love? Isn’t there, in love, a single little seed of reason and apprenticeship? Is the love of humanity and of the unknown person just a vague human feeling, only deeply sensed and practised by characters such as the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa de Calcutta, in a sort of exclusivity of the most perfect of us?

Or are we all – though very far from being saints - capable of learning to love and extending its natural boundaries? Isn’t reason, backed by appropriate values (of good and evil) capable of raising our standards of love, turning us into better beings?

We can argue negatively. Reason can make us more compassionate, tolerant, generous, and only that. It can’t make us love, truly.

But we can argue differently. We aren’t born educated. The values – managed partly by reason – can raise our ethical standards and our capacity of love, namely brotherly love. Love can grow ethically, or to use the poetic words of Pico della Mirandola, the great Italian humanist of the fifteen century:

«Upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. And whichever the seeds a man cultivates, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.»

Our ideas of life and our values can make us love (or hate). The top of love’s heights aren’t within our reach. But we aren’t condemned just to get what’s instinctive in love (as in many other dimensions of life).

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Emmanuel Kant

It is not in the power of man to love anyone at command.
E. Kant, 1724-1804, German philosopher, Critic of Practical Reason

Because they see me gazing where thou art.
Caroline Norton, 1808-1877, I Do Not Love Thee

The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them, as Lucilius says, “from their mother's womb'' all that they will ever possess. The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities.

But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God.

Finally, it is not freedom from a body, but its spiritual intelligence, which makes the angel. If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man

For a full version of Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man:
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/

For more information:
Books, Films and Cultural Stuff on these issues? See Love Essays Store (in association with Amazon)