Class Reflections: C.S. Lewis' Four Loves

from our first real day of class in a new semester

Last academic year, as I was teaching my Foundations of Philosophy class sections at Marquette University, I regularly wrote a set of posts of reflections on the texts, thinkers, and topics we engaged with after teaching. I am teaching that course again this semester, but this time with a quite different set of readings, as I’m centering the class on themes of love, friendship, sexual desire, and relationships (you can see the list of readings here). My hope is to write a new set of interesting posts of reflections after each class session this semester, so roughly two posts per week.

Earlier this week, my Foundations in Philosophy class met for two class sessions. The first was what students often call “syllabus day” where, as you can guess, we spend much of the session discussing what we’ll be doing in the class, as well as engaging in a bit of discussion about philosophy as a discipline, and the main themes the class will be structured around.

We get rolling in earnest with the second class session, and I thought that a good piece to center our early discussions around would be some selections from C.S. Lewis’ famous short work The Four Loves. I included the majority of the introduction to the work (which is chapter 1), and then some portion of chapters 3-6, each of which centers upon one of those four types of “love” understood broadly speaking.

We had some excellent discussion during the class session, spurred by some of the points that Lewis was making, as well as by some of the questions I asked the students, and examples that we used to explore the ideas. So that’s quite promising as a start. We seem to have a good rapport already, and more than just a critical mass of students who are comfortable with engaging in conversation. We’ll likely need that, since we’re going to be exploring what philosophers with many different perspectives have to say about sensitive and controversial matters.

Did The Greeks Really Distinguish Four Loves?

Lewis is a careful and well-informed reader with an extensive background in the literature he draws upon in his work. He does use Greek terms (a well as Latin ones) in the Four Loves as handy ways to distinguish between different sorts of relationships with others. One thing that I don’t see him doing within the work, but which a lot of other people have done with his work, is making a very strong claim, which as a reader of ancient Greek thought seems indefensible to me. And so, I bring that up with my students right away.

What is it? You can find it formulated in various manners, but it generally runs along these lines: The ancient Greeks had four different words for what we call “love”, and they used each of these four words to denote a fundamentally distinct sort of relationship. They spoke of storgē or “affection”, philia or “friendship”, eros or “romantic love” (or “sexual desire”), and agapē or “self-giving” or “self-less love”.

Lewis does use these terms, though he more often speaks of charity than agapē (and about as often about amicitia as he does philia), but he knows better than to pretend that throughout the centuries of the ancient period, everyone used these terms in precisely the same way in Greek. In fact, all you need to do is read some Plato or Aristotle in Greek to be able to see that the vocabulary for the wide range of human affections, desires, relationships, and actions that we lump under “loves” can be quite varied and even inconsistent.

Reality isn’t as simple as the schemas that people of all walks of life (not just philosophers) would like to impose upon it. And what people actually thought and wrote, that’s part of reality as well. There’s little legitimate point in trying to shoehorn anything as complex and interesting as love and relationships into inflexible categories along those lines.

Now that isn’t to say that we can’t make distinctions between, for instance, being friends with a person and having a romantic relationship with them, or between the sort of self-giving love that later authors might call caritas or agapē to distinguish it from just affection, or friendship, or romantic love. But they’re not so neatly separated from each other as would be simplifiers like to think. So I caution my students against adopting too neat and simple a classification as we start our term.

Lewis’ Distrust Of Reductionism

I wasn’t surprised at all when I asked my students if any of them knew what the words “reductionism” or “reductionist” meant and none of them said they did. It’s a bit of jargon common in philosophical circles (as well as a few other largely academic ones), but not in our general or popular culture. I do think being aware of the myriad ways many people (including a lot of academics) are reductionist in how they approach important and interesting matters.

Lewis furnished us an excellent “in” to bringing up this problem, centering on the term “mere”, where he writes:

[W]e must be cautious about calling Need-love "mere selfishness". Mere is always a dangerous word.

I read that passage aloud, and noted that we could substitute other words for “mere”, which have the same sort of effect. “Only”, “just”, “simply” are just a few of them. What’s wrong with saying that one thing is “mere” or “merely” something else? Why should we be leery of accepting such claims or judgements?

Lewis himself furnishes us a number of examples within the book of people trying to reduce something complex, messy, and potentially confusing to something seemingly more manageable and easier to wrap one’s head around. Thinking about romantic love is a useful one. Is it really just about animal drives for sexual pleasure that result in us feeling some sort of attraction? That can certainly be part of it, and perhaps some of our erotic or romantic relationships might turn out to be just that, when we’re honest with ourselves. But is that all there is to it, as some people like to tell themselves (and can’t resist constantly telling everyone else)? That seems pretty unlikely and indefensible as a universal or even general statement.

I brought up in class the notion that we see some people bandying about these days that our sense of affection and attachment is just a matter of brain chemicals that our bodies have evolved to produce and to be affected by. It would be odd to deny that chemicals like oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin, or others play some role in how we feel in relation to others. But it takes a certain sort of nuttiness, myopia, or simplemindedness to convince oneself that being in love with another person, or feeling a strong sense of attachment to and affection for them, is just an effect of brain chemistry.

Why Do We Need To Distinguish Loves?

I’ll close these reflections by bringing up one additional matter that we discussed in class, drawing partly upon the portions of Lewis’ book I assigned to them but also looking ahead to some of the other thinkers we’re going to read. Why do we need to make these distinctions between different sorts of loves or more broadly speaking relationships?

Mixing things up, confusing them for each other, is one great way to not only misunderstand matters but, since we live not just in the realm of theory but in a life where we apply our ideas in practice, an almost guaranteed way (unless we get really lucks for a while) to make a mess out of our own lives. And given that we exist in relationships, perhaps we’ll screw up other people’s lives as well.

I brought up one example that I’m sure we’ll be returning to many times in the semester, that of mistaking a friendship for a romantic relationship (or even trying to build a friendship in order to hopefully later on transform it into a romantic relationship). People get this sort of thing wrong all the time, and they’re often not helped by the often screwy messages they get from media, friends, family members, or other common sources. Understanding how these two distinct types of “love” are in fact different from each other not only helps one not screw up the one by trying to transform it into the other. It also gives a person a basis for appreciating what’s good in either one of those types of relationships.

Aristotle is one of the people who we’ll be discussing in a few weeks (and I’ll be talking about him in an upcoming online conference as well). You may know already that he distinguishes three main types of what he calls “friendships”, a term which he extends to business partnerships, companionship, and romantic relationships as well as to friendship proper. He also discusses a particularly close type of friendship, which can exist between two good people who love each other and desire the good for the other for their own sake, not just to get something from the other.

A common mistake people make (and one I’ve made myself in the past) is trying to take a romantic relationship, perhaps one that has already involved sexual desire, activity, and pleasure, and to turn it into the best and rarest form of friendship. It nearly always fails, and if we had read our Aristotle (and understood it), we might not have set ourselves up for that sort of failure.

We’ll be talking about a number of other useful distinctions and how we can apply them within our own lives and relationships in the course of the semester. And I’ll write about some of those here, but those will come at a later date.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.