The Ontology of Love

In 1205, a sixteen-year-old named Yuan Haowen (元好問), on his way to sit the civil examinations, met a man who trapped wild geese. He had caught one that morning and killed it, the man said, and its mate, although it had slipped the net, would not fly away. It kept crying and in the end threw itself to the ground and died. The boy bought both birds, buried them, and wrote a song that begins with a question Chinese readers still know by heart:

I ask the world: what is this thing, love, that it makes two creatures pledge each other their lives and their deaths?Yuan Haowen 元好問, 〈摸魚兒·雁丘詞〉. Its preface tells the story: 「乙丑歲，赴試并州，道逢捕雁者云：『今旦獲一雁，殺之矣。其脫網者悲鳴不能去，竟自投於地而死。』」

No doubt the boy is saddened by this, but more importantly, he cannot make sense of what he has seen, and interestingly, he does not ask why the goose died, or whether it was foolish, or how it must have felt. He asks what the thing is, 是何物, as if love were an object somewhere in the world that he might find and name. And then, in the same breath, he answers with something that is not an object at all. 直教生死相許: whatever love is, it is what makes two creatures stake their lives and their deaths on each other. The goose did not die of a wound, but because its ’lover’ was no longer there, and a world without its mate was not a world it could go on living in. Love, in this answer, is not an ordinary “object”. It is the way a world holds together for someone, and the way it falls apart.

We have many answers to the question of what love is, but most of them answer a different question. Neuroscience can show which parts of the brain wake when a lover sees a photograph of the beloved, and biology can explain why animals that bond in pairs leave more offspring. Here is an answer Schopenhauer gave in 1844: lovers are the instruments of the species, which uses their rapture to bring the next generation into being. Each of these answers treats love as something that happens inside a creature that already exists, an event with causes and effects. Yuan Haowen’s answer points elsewhere. The goose’s love was not an event inside a goose but a way the goose existed, so wholly that when its mate was gone it could no longer be. To ask about love in this sense is to ask not what love is made of, but what it is to be in love: what kind of existence it is, how the world shows itself to someone who loves, and what becomes of the lover’s own being when the beloved is taken away. This is the kind of question philosophers call ontological. It does not ask for a definition, as a dictionary does, but for what it means for something to be, and in what way it is. The next section says where that question comes from and how Heidegger gave it new life.

This essay tries to answer Yuan Haowen’s question in that sense, and my claim is: Love is a way of being in the world, and being-in-love is, in a sense, the most fundamental and the most authentic way a human being can be in the world at all. Yearning, the German Sehnsucht, the Chinese 思, is how love appears in beings who are finite, divided and mortal. That is why love and death are never far apart.

The way runs through Heidegger and Plato, through Chinese poetry and the Buddha’s teaching, and into the night of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Then it turns to a recent horror film, Curry Barker’s Obsession, which tells the story of a love potion in reverse, and to the question it raises, whether we love another person or an image of our own making. It ends with Hegel and Lacan, with the philosopher Simon May’s idea of love as a home, and with the place where East and West meet.

Being-in-Love

Aristotle described what we now call ontology as “a science which investigates being as being” and called it first philosophy.

Martin Heidegger brought the question back to life with a distinction that is easy to state but difficult to keep hold of: “The Being of entities ‘is’ not itself an entity.” We can study a person as psychologists do and learn a great deal about a being without ever asking what it means for it to be. Heidegger called the first kind of inquiry “ontic” and the second “ontological”. The human being, which he called Dasein, being-there, is the entity where “ontological” matters: “an entity for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue.” In these terms the brain scans of lovers are ontic, but the ontological question is different: what kind of being is being in love? How is the world for someone who loves, and how is that person in it?

Heidegger’s answer to the question of what human beings are was that they are in the world, and he took great care with the little word “in.” We are not in the world the way water is in a glass. In Heidegger’s grammar, he connects bin, “am,” with bei, “alongside”: “I am” means “I reside or dwell alongside the world, as that which is familiar to me.” To be, for a human being, is to dwell beside what one cherishes. At the root of being-in-the-world, in the preposition itself, seemingly lies a love that the book never names.

Two years earlier Heidegger had named it in a letter. In May 1925 he wrote to Hannah Arendt, then his student and his lover, that “being in love” means “being pressed into one’s ownmost existence,” in der Liebe sein = in die eigenste Existenz gedrängt sein. “Ownmost” is the superlative that Being and Time would use two years later for death, Dasein’s “ownmost possibility, non-relational, certain and as such indefinite, not to be outstripped.” Between the letter and the book, the ownmost passed from what binds us to another to what we face alone.

He did not forget love entirely. In the 1929 lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” he asked how the whole of what is can be revealed to us, and answered that it is revealed in moods. Profound boredom, “drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog,” draws all things together into “a remarkable indifference.” Then he turns to love:

Joy at the beloved’s very existence, not at her qualities but at the plain fact that she is there, reveals the whole. The street, the weather, the stranger on the train are suddenly lit, and the world seems to be there for the first time. But Heidegger adds that such moods conceal the nothing he is looking for, which only anxiety reveals, and he follows anxiety into the dark.

Late in life, in seminars he gave to psychiatrists in the 1960s, Heidegger returned to the question. Care, he said, is not a gloomy feeling but the structure of existence itself, and rightly understood it “is never distinguishable from ’love.’” Then he wrote what reads like a promissory note: “One can even expect that the essential determination of love, which looks for a guideline in the fundamental-ontological determination of Da-sein, will be deeper and more comprehensive than the one seeing love as something higher than care.” He never paid it in full, but late in life he left one sentence toward it. In 1960 he called a saying he attributed to Augustine, amo, volo ut sis, “I love: I will that you be,” “probably the deepest interpretation of what love is,” and glossed it: “Love is letting-be, in the deeper sense in which it calls forth the essence.”Heidegger, speech for Ludwig von Ficker’s eightieth birthday, 1960: “Wohl die tiefste Deutung dessen, was Liebe ist, steht bei Augustinus in dem Wort, das lautet: »amo volo ut sis«, ich liebe, das heißt, ich will, daß das Geliebte sei, was es ist. Liebe ist das Seinlassen in dem tieferen Sinn, demgemäß es das Wesen hervorruft.” I will come back to that saying at the end, because it draws the line between love and the wish to be loved.

So this is what I mean by an ontology of love, and it goes one step further than Heidegger went. If being-in-the-world means dwelling beside what one cherishes, then being-in-love is not a feeling that happens to someone who already exists. It is a way of existing, and, in a sense, the most fundamental way in which a human being is in the world. Heidegger began his analysis with the hammer in the workshop and ended it with death. But before any of us picked up a tool or learned that we would die, we were held, and the world first came to us as a face bent over us. Care, use, anxiety and resolve are ways of being in a world that love first opened. When we fall in love as adults the world is opened again, which is why it seems new. Heidegger himself, in a footnote to Being and Time, quoted Augustine: non intratur in veritatem, nisi per charitatem, “one does not enter into truth except through love.”

The Oldest of the Gods

The West’s first great book about love is Plato’s Symposium, to which nearly every idea about love can be traced back. The first speaker, Phaedrus, calls Eros among the most ancient of the gods, “and as most venerable, he is the cause of all our highest blessings.” Then he says what the West would never forget: “only such as are in love will consent to die for others; not merely men will do it, but women too.” Alcestis died for her husband and the gods sent her soul back from Hades; Achilles died for his lover Patroclus and was sent to the Isles of the Blest; Orpheus, who tried to bring his wife back by entering Hades alive, was given only a phantom, because he lacked the spirit to die for love. “A lover, filled as he is with a god, surpasses his favorite in divinity.” Here, at the beginning, is love as a god who asks for death and repays it with immortality, and the lovers who die for love are its martyrs.

Aristophanes instead gives a surprisingly modern view of love. Human beings were once round, and Zeus cut them in half, so that each of us is “but a tally of a man,” searching for its other half. When two halves find each other they cannot say what they want; the soul is “wishing for something else that it cannot express, only divining and darkly hinting.” Suppose, says Aristophanes, that the smith god Hephaestus stood over a pair of lovers and offered this:

“No one on hearing this, we are sure, would demur to it.” Here is the first Liebestod in Western literature, offered by a god as the fulfillment of every lover’s wish, and here is the definition every theory of love as lack has repeated: “we were entire; and the craving and pursuit of that entirety is called Love.”

Socrates seems at first to agree. Whoever desires, he gets Agathon to admit, desires “something they have not or are not or lack.” Then he tells what he learned from the priestess Diotima, and the lack turns into something else. Eros is not a god but a daimon, a spirit “midway between” gods and mortals, and his work is to bind them, so that, as the Greek says, “the All is bound together with itself.” This is love not as a feeling inside a person but as the bond of being. Diotima rejects Aristophanes outright: love is “neither for half nor for whole” unless it is good. Love “loves good to be one’s own for ever,” and since mortals cannot have anything forever, love becomes “begetting on a beautiful thing by means of both the body and the soul,” the begetting of children, poems and laws, the only immortality a mortal can have.

The Symposium gives us both answers, and the history of the subject is the history of their quarrel. In Aristophanes love is lack, a yearning for the missing half. In Diotima love is closer to being, the daimon that binds the All together. The Neo-Platonist Plotinus said it most daringly: in the One, “the longing and the being are the same.”

The Thirst and the Lotus

China wrote its metaphysics of love in poetry. In 1598 the playwright Tang Xianzu wrote The Peony Pavilion, in which a girl dies of longing for a lover she has met only in a dream and is brought back to life by his love, and in its preface he wrote the most often quoted sentences about qing 情, love or feeling:

“Love is of source unknown, yet it grows ever deeper. The living may die of it, by its power the dead live again. Love is not love at its fullest if one who lives is unwilling to die for it, or if it cannot restore to life one who has so died.” Love here passes through death in both directions. Tang closed the preface with a challenge to the Neo-Confucian philosophers, who taught that feeling must be governed by li 理, principle or reason: 第云理之所必無，安知情之所必有邪, “They say only that reason holds this cannot be. How do they know that feeling holds it must be?” We will meet this opposition again in Wagner, where it is called night and day.

Seven centuries earlier the Tang poet Li Shangyin had given yearning its most exact image:

“The spring silkworm spins until it dies, and only then is its silk used up; the candle’s tears dry only when it has burned to ash.” The silk, 絲, sounds like 思, longing, and the line says that longing ends only in death. Bai Juyi, in his “Song of Everlasting Sorrow,” gave the vow of two lovers to outlast death, 在天願作比翼鳥，在地願為連理枝, “in heaven, may we be two birds that fly wing to wing; on earth, two trees whose branches grow into one,” and ended with a sorrow that outlasts the world: 天長地久有時盡，此恨綿綿無絕期, “heaven endures and earth lasts long, yet they will end; this sorrow goes on and on and will have no end.”

But the oldest Eastern answer to Yuan Haowen’s question came from India, with the Buddha, and it is the darker one. In the chain of dependent origination, 十二因緣, the twelve links by which suffering arises, love is the eighth link and being the tenth. Feeling conditions craving, 受緣愛; craving conditions grasping, grasping conditions becoming, 愛緣取，取緣有; becoming conditions birth, and birth old age and death. In the Chinese words of the chain, love, 愛, is the cause of being, 有, and being is the cause of death. Two thousand years before Schopenhauer, the same thought: love is the thirst that binds us to existence and so to suffering. The Heart Sutra describes the mind set free of that thirst: 心無罣礙，無罣礙故，無有恐怖，遠離顛倒夢想, “the mind has no hindrance; having no hindrance, it has no fear, and is far from upside-down dreams.” The Buddhist answer is not that love is false. It is that love, as thirst, keeps the wheel of becoming turning, and that what it loves is always passing away. Whether there is another love, one that does not thirst, is a question the tradition took as seriously as Plato did, and I will come back to it.

Japan, which received both the Buddha and Chinese poetry, turned the love-death into a theater. In 1703 the playwright Chikamatsu Monzaemon put on the puppet stage a clerk and a courtesan who had killed themselves together a month before, and the last act of The Love Suicides at Sonezaki follows the lovers through the night to the place where they will die: “We who walk the road to death, to what should we be likened? / To the frost by the road that leads to the graveyard, / Vanishing with each step ahead: / This dream of a dream is sorrowful.” They pray that “in the world to come, / May we remain together on one lotus.” They die with the Buddha’s name on their lips, and what they ask of him is the one thing his teaching tells them to give up: to be together still, in the next world, forever.

Consecrated to the Night

In 1854, Richard Wagner wrote to Franz Liszt about his two discoveries: one was Schopenhauer, “the greatest philosopher since Kant,” whose “chief idea, the final denial of the will to live, is of a terrible seriousness, but uniquely redeeming.” The other was an opera. “As I have never in my life enjoyed the true happiness of love, I want to raise a monument to this most beautiful of all dreams, in which, from beginning to end, this love shall for once be wholly sated. I have in my head a Tristan and Isolde.” In the same letter he describes the consolation he has found: “the heartfelt and inward longing for death: full unconsciousness, total non-being, the vanishing of all dreams.”

Schopenhauer’s theory of love leaves the lovers no will of their own, and what draws two people “exclusively to each other with such power is the will-to-live which manifests itself in the whole species.” Their longing “exceeds the measure of a mortal heart” because it is not theirs; it is the longing of life itself to go on. When it is thwarted, “the individual is too weak a vessel to be capable of enduring the infinite longing of the will of the species,” and “the issue is suicide, sometimes the double suicide of the two lovers.” Lovers, he wrote, “are the traitors who secretly strive to perpetuate the whole trouble and toil that would otherwise rapidly come to an end.”

Yet Schopenhauer’s own system complicates the reading of Tristan that is usually drawn from it. Suicide, “far from being denial of the will, is a phenomenon of the will’s strong affirmation. … The suicide wills life.” On his terms, a love-death would be the will asserting itself, not the will denied. Wagner saw the problem. In December 1858, alone in Venice, he reread Schopenhauer and decided that the philosopher had missed “a path of salvation recognised by none of the philosophers, particularly not by Sch., the pathway to complete pacification of the Will through love, and that no abstract love of mankind, but the love which actually blossoms from the soil of sexual love.”

Tristan is bringing the Irish princess Isolde across the sea to be the bride of his uncle, King Marke. She loves him, and she resolves that they will both die. She orders the death potion, and Tristan understands and drinks: “Kindly potion of forgetting, I drink you without wavering!” Isolde snatches the cup: “Mine the half! Traitor, I drink it to you!” But her maid has poured the love potion instead, and the stage direction says that in their faces “defiance of death soon gives way to the glow of love.” When Isolde learns what she has drunk, her first words are not a cry of joy. Muß ich leben? Must I live? In Wagner the potion does not create the love. It removes the last thing that kept it unspoken, the expectation of going on living. They drink believing they are already dead, and with nothing left to lose to the world they can confess what the world forbade. Love in Tristan begins at the moment the lovers consent to die. In the third act, delirious, Tristan says that he brewed the potion himself, “from father’s need and mother’s woe, from love’s tears ever and always.”

The second act is a hymn to the night. The day is the world of King Marke’s court, of “fame and honor, power and gain,” and the lovers curse it. They call themselves Nachtgeweihte, consecrated to the night. The day is what Tang Xianzu called li, reason and propriety, and what Heidegger called the “they,” the public world in which “everyone is the other, and no one is himself.” “O sink down, night of love,” they sing, “make me forget that I live; take me up into your lap, release me from the world.” The night has its own theology, and Isolde states it. Did her maid not know “Lady Love,” Frau Minne, the “ruler of the world’s becoming”? “Life and death are subject to her.” Isolde had taken the work of death into her own hands, and “Lady Love wrested it from my power.” This is Phaedrus’s god under a medieval name. Then Isolde asks a question about grammar. “But our love, is it not called Tristan and Isolde? This sweet little word, and: if Tristan died, would death not destroy it?” Tristan answers that death could destroy only what keeps him from loving her forever. So they exchange their names, “You Isolde, Tristan I, no longer Isolde!”, and sing ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen, without naming, without parting, and, in the same breath, the word Liebestod: “longingly desired love-death.”

In the third act Tristan lies wounded at his castle by the sea, waiting for her ship. “Longing, longing: in dying, to long; for longing, not to die!” He curses the potion for condemning him “never to die.” Li Shangyin’s silkworm spins its longing until it dies; Tristan cannot die of his. This is what the music has been saying since its second bar, where four notes, F, B, D♯ and G♯, sound together in a chord that asks for resolution and moves only to another chord that asks again. For four hours the harmony yearns and does not arrive. Wagner’s program note for the Prelude reads like a gloss on Schopenhauer, “longing, longing, unquenchable, ever newly self-begetting desire; the only redemption, death,” and then asks a question Schopenhauer could not have asked: “Shall we call it death? Or is it the wondrous world of night, out of which, as the legend tells, an ivy and a vine grew up in close embrace on Tristan’s and Isolde’s grave?”

Isolde arrives at last, and Tristan dies in her arms. Then she sings over his body:

“Gently and softly, how he smiles, how sweetly he opens his eyes: do you see it, friends? … In the surging swell, in the ringing sound, in the wafting All of the world’s breath, to drown, to sink, unconscious, highest bliss!” She sinks, says the stage direction, “as if transfigured,” onto his body. We call this ending the Liebestod, but Wagner did not. In 1863 he called the Prelude “Love-Death” and the ending “Transfiguration,” Verklärung; the names were reversed later. And in the last bars, for the first time in the opera, the Tristan chord comes home. It resolves into B major, and the longing that began in the second bar is at rest.

What, then, is the psychology of the Liebestod? Is it the futile yearning of a will that has fooled itself, ending in the nothing it fled, as the Schopenhauerian reading has it? Or is it a martyrdom to love as a god, of the kind Phaedrus praised? Wagner’s own documents tell against the first reading. Isolde does not take her own life, she dies in “highest bliss,” Wagner called the ending a transfiguration, and he set out to amend Schopenhauer so that the opera could mean what its music says. The second reading fits only in part. Alcestis died for her husband, in his place, so that he might live, and the gods rewarded the deed. Tristan and Isolde do not die for each other. They die into each other, to abolish the little word “and,” which is closer to Aristophanes’ smithy than to Phaedrus’s martyrs: to be welded into one and share a single death. Their god is not the beloved but Love itself, Frau Minne, and the beloved is the door through which they go to her. Freud described the state: “At the height of being in love the boundary between ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are one.” Ohne Nennen, ohne Trennen. On this description the Liebestod is not a wish for nothing but a wish for a being without boundary, a self that no longer has to guard its borders. Nietzsche, who loved Tristan above everything else Wagner wrote, felt its double edge: “I still seek today a work of equally dangerous fascination, of an equally shuddering and sweet infinity, as Tristan is.”

The Wish

Heavy spoilers for the film: skip this section if you haven’t watched it.

Curry Barker’s Obsession is a horror film about a love potion (not really, but speaking in terms of Tristan und Isolde). Bear, a shy young man, has loved his childhood friend Nikki for years but does not have the courage to confess. He buys a novelty toy called a One Wish Willow, snaps it in his car, and wishes that Nikki would love him more than anyone or anything in the world—and it becomes “true”. However, in the middle of their first kiss she screams in blind panic. We later understand that the real Nikki is in fact trapped inside her body, and what critics have called a possession, though “without any actual demons,” is taking place as the result of the wish. The possessed Nikki is “obsessed” with Bear. The toy’s helpline tells Bear that a wish cannot be changed or cancelled and ends only when the person who made it dies. At night, when her body sleeps, the real Nikki surfaces and begs him to kill her, yet Bear asks, “What’s so bad about being with me?” At the end he swallows a handful of pills, and “Nikki”, off-screen, snaps the last willow, seemingly wishing that he would love her as she loves him. He kisses her among the bodies of the two people she has killed and dies in her arms. She lifts a gun to follow him, and in that instant his death breaks his wish. The real Nikki drops the gun, pushes his body away, and wails.

Set beside Tristan, the wish is the love potion turned inside out. In Wagner the potion was meant to be death and released a love that was already there, chosen and mutual. In Barker’s film the wish is meant to be love, and what it releases, in the film’s own image, is a self screaming inside a body that adores him. Barker has described the wish in exactly these terms, “taking away someone’s autonomy, taking away someone’s self,” and critics have read the film as a parable of consent and of the entitlement of the “nice guy.”

The film also inverts Tristan point by point. In Tristan the night is the realm of true love and the day the realm of lies. In Obsession the day belongs to the enchanted Nikki, and the night is the only time the real Nikki can speak. The ending stages a Liebestod and then undoes it. For one kiss both of them are under a spell, each wishing the other into love, and he dies in her arms as Tristan dies in Isolde’s. She lifts the gun to follow him, as Isolde follows Tristan, and the love vanishes. Here too love and death are bound together, but in reverse: the wish can end only with the wisher’s death, so death is not the consummation of the love but the only way out of it. Barker first filmed a double death, like Romeo and Juliet, and changed it to the ending in which Nikki survives.

Is Obsession a horror only in the modern sense, and Tristan not a horror at all? The two works suggest two senses of the word. The modern sense is the one most critics wrote about: the horror of consent violated, of one person’s will imposed on another. The older sense is the one Nietzsche felt in Tristan, a “shuddering and sweet infinity,” the dread and rapture of losing oneself in a love one has chosen. Read in Heidegger’s terms, the two works stage two ways of abolishing the “and.” The lovers in Tristan dissolve both names into a night they enter together. The wish removes one of the two, and leaves Bear’s question, “What’s so bad about being with me?”, asked of someone who is not there to answer.

The Image and the Other

“I think Bear was in love with the idea of Nikki,” Michael Johnston said of his character. “Total limerence.” That names one of the oldest worries about love. Do I love you, or an image of you that I have made? The question sounds epistemological, a question about what I can know of another person. In love it is also ontological, because it asks what the beloved is: a thing with qualities I can see, or a being that always exceeds what I see.

Plato saw the problem. In the Phaedrus the lover, seeing in a beautiful face an image of the beauty he once saw among the gods, “would offer sacrifice to his beloved as to an idol or a god,” and each lover “chooses his love from the ranks of the beautiful according to his character, and he fashions him and adorns him like a statue, as though he were his god.” The lover is a sculptor, and the beloved a statue of the lover’s own god. Schopenhauer called the image a trick. Nature, he says, reaches its end only “by implanting in the individual a certain delusion,” a Wahn, and when the species has what it wanted, “every lover finds himself duped.” Wagner turned the word around: in Tristan it is the day that is “deceiving delusion,” täuschender Wahn, and the night of love that is wahnlos, free of delusion.

Goethe made the image the subject of his first masterpiece. Werther loves a woman engaged to another man and lives his love mostly in letters, and he knows what he is doing; what he writes of her, he admits, is “tiresome abstractions that do not express a single trait of her self.” In one letter he gives love as projection its emblem:

He ends the letter with the question of this section: “Wilhelm, are they phantoms, when we are happy?” The lantern is both things at once. Love projects, and what it projects is a phantom; but love is also the light without which there are no pictures at all, Heidegger’s joy in another key. In the end Werther shoots himself with pistols that Lotte herself took down from the wall. Goethe, who wrote the book out of his own unhappy love, later said that he had felt “eased and enlightened by having turned reality into poetry,” while his readers “thought that poetry ought to be turned into reality, … and that at any rate one ought to shoot oneself.”

Chinese poetry knows the same distance between the image and the person. Ten years after his wife died, Su Shi dreamed of her, and wrote that even if they could meet again she would not know him, 縱使相逢應不識，塵滿面，鬢如霜, “my face covered in dust, my temples like frost.” Yet in the dream she is as she was: 夜來幽夢忽還鄉，小軒窗，正梳妝。相顧無言，惟有淚千行, “last night in a dark dream I was suddenly home; by the little window she was combing her hair. We looked at each other without a word, and there were only a thousand lines of tears.” The beloved of the dream has not aged, and the living man would be a stranger to her. The Diamond Sutra gives the Buddhist verdict on every such form: 凡所有相，皆是虛妄。若見諸相非相，則見如來, “all that has form is illusory; if you see forms as no-forms, you see the Thus-Come.”

Kierkegaard’s answer, in Works of Love (1847), is a duty: “in loving the individual, actual man, we do not slip in an imagined conception of how we believe or might wish that this man should be. He who allows himself to do this does not love the man he sees, but again something unseen, his own idea.” So “the task does not consist in finding the lovable object; but the task consists in finding the object already given or chosen lovable, and in continuing to find him lovable however changed he is.” Thomas Mann, in Death in Venice, drew the opposite case and gave it Plato’s words. The aging writer Aschenbach falls in love with a boy, Tadzio, at a hotel on the Lido, and never says a word to him; the whole love passes in looking, and Mann lets him imagine a Socratic speech: “beauty alone is both lovely and visible at once,” and “the lover is more divine than the beloved, since the god is in the one, but not in the other.” Aschenbach stays in a city where cholera has broken out because he cannot leave the boy, and dies there.

Read with Heidegger and Kierkegaard, the line does not run between love with images and love without them. We never see another person without imagination, and Werther’s lantern is also the light by which the world becomes visible. The line runs between an image that remains answerable to the other person and an image that replaces her. That difference is ontological before it is epistemological. A stone is what it is, and to know it is to know its properties. A human being, in Heidegger’s language, is a potentiality-for-being, always ahead of herself in possibilities that are not yet actual. To love her, on this account, is to see possibilities that are hers and hold them open for her to choose. That is why Heidegger could say that love “calls forth the essence,” and why Kierkegaard could say that love “believes all things, and yet is never deceived.” Love imagines, but it imagines toward the other’s freedom.

The Labour of the Negative

Is dialectic related to an ontology of love? For Plato dialectic was the way up Diotima’s ladder. For Hegel it was the movement of being itself. His Science of Logic begins with “being, pure being, without any further determination,” finds that pure being cannot be told apart from nothing, and concludes that their truth is “this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one in the other: becoming.” Love was the young Hegel’s first name for this movement. In a fragment of about 1797 he wrote: “In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate; life [in the subject] senses life [in the object].” Twenty years later he called love “the most tremendous contradiction,” which the understanding cannot resolve. Love means “that I do not wish to be a self-subsistent and independent person” and “that I find myself in another person,” and “love is at once the propounding and the resolving of this contradiction.” In his lectures on art he put it in one sentence: “The true essence of love consists in giving up the consciousness of oneself, forgetting oneself in another self, yet in this surrender and oblivion having and possessing oneself alone.”

Set that sentence beside Isolde’s last word. She too forgets herself in another self, unbewußt, but she does not come back, and the second half of Hegel’s sentence is exactly what the Liebestod leaves out. Hegel had no patience for nights in which all differences dissolve. In the preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit he mocked the philosophers who “pass off their Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black.” The life of God may be called “a disporting of Love with itself,” he wrote, but the idea “sinks into mere edification, and even insipidity, if it lacks the seriousness, the suffering, the patience, and the labour of the negative.” And then: “the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.” For Hegel love does not abolish the little word “and.” It keeps it alive: the isolated self dies, and is found again in the other. In this sense dialectic is the grammar of love’s being, a unity that keeps its difference, a self won by being given away, a contradiction held rather than solved. To dissolve both terms into the night is the Liebestod; to remove one of them is the wish.

Jacques Lacan spent a year of his seminar reading the Symposium and took from it the formula he repeated for the rest of his life: “love is giving what you don’t have.” He found it in Diotima’s myth, in Penia, Poverty, the mother of Eros, who “by definition, by structure, has nothing to give but her lack.” What draws a lover, for Lacan, is not any of the beloved’s qualities but what Alcibiades saw in Socrates, the golden image of a god hidden inside an ugly statue, which Lacan called the objet petit a, the something in you more than you. He saw its danger: “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you, the objet petit a, I mutilate you.” Lacan also said that “there’s no such thing as a sexual relationship”: no Hephaestus will weld the halves. But “what makes up for the sexual relationship is, quite precisely, love,” and love “aims at being, namely, at what slips away most in language.” Even Lacan, the analyst most suspicious of love’s illusions, ends by calling love ontological.

Slavoj Žižek, reading Hegel through Lacan, adds two things. The first is about choice: “the decision to love somebody is free (compulsory love is no love), yet this decision can never be a present and conscious one … all I can do in the present is to ascertain that the decision has already been taken and that I am caught in the inexorable necessity to love.” The second is about Tristan. The death drive, Žižek says, is not a wish to die but “a name for the ‘undead’ eternal life itself,” and Tristan in the third act “is not desperate because of his fear of dying: what makes him so desperate is the fact that, without Isolde, he cannot die and is condemned to eternal longing.” For Schopenhauer the lovers’ longing was the will to live of the species. For Žižek it is a life that cannot stop, an excess no living body can contain, which is why it looks so much like death.

Homecoming in the Unhomely

In Love: A History, Simon May defines love in terms of ontology. “Love, I will argue, is the rapture we feel for people and things that inspire in us the hope of an indestructible grounding for our life.” He calls this hope “ontological rootedness”: “love’s overriding concern is to find a home for our life and being.” May is also a critic of the religion of love whose liturgy Tristan is. “That new god was love. Human love.” The formula “God is love” has been turned into “love is God,” and “to its immense cost, human love has usurped a role that only God’s love used to play.” Isolde’s Frau Minne is that god.

But May’s word “home” is exactly where Heidegger would raise his hand. Being-in-the-world begins as dwelling alongside what is familiar. Yet in anxiety the world loses its familiarity, and we discover that “‘uncanniness’ also means ’not-being-at-home’.” The ordinary comfort of the “they” is a flight from this discovery, and Heidegger insists that “that kind of Being-in-the-world which is tranquillized and familiar is a mode of Dasein’s uncanniness, not the reverse.” If love were only a home in that sense, a warm room in which to forget that we are mortal and alone, Heidegger would call it a flight. Freud explained why the homely turns so easily into its opposite. The uncanny “is what was once heimisch, homelike, familiar,” and he added a joke: “Love is home-sickness.”

So is love the inauthentic comfort Heidegger describes, or something beyond it? Diotima’s Eros is “shoeless and homeless,” and Augustine’s heart is restless until it rests in God. Heidegger himself called philosophy a homesickness, and added: “Our very being is this restlessness.” Love does not cure that restlessness. It is that restlessness, finding a place to rest that does not deny it. In his lectures on Hölderlin, Heidegger found the phrase for it: “becoming homely in being unhomely.” That is the home that love is. Not a flight from the uncanniness of existence into the comfort of the “they,” and not the lonely, “non-relational” uncanniness of anxiety, but a third thing: the uncanny shared. The beloved does not make one’s existence less strange, less mortal, less thrown. The beloved is the one with whom its strangeness becomes a place to live. May is right that love seeks ontological rootedness, but the roots go down into the unhomely, not away from it, and a love that tries to abolish the unhomely, by sinking into the night, abolishes itself.

That is also why being-in-love is an authentic way of being-in-the-world, and perhaps the most common way that ordinary people are ever lifted out of the everyday “they.” Few people have the anxiety that Being and Time describes, in which the whole world slides away. Most people have fallen in love, and when they do, what one does and what everyone thinks no longer decide anything, and the question of who one is comes back with a force nothing else has. Heidegger, in 1925, called it being pressed into one’s ownmost existence.

Two Loves

Is there, then, a great tension between West and East on what love is? At first sight it is the deepest tension possible, because both see the same structure and pass opposite verdicts on it. Both see that love begets being. Diotima’s Eros binds the All together, and in Dante love moves the sun and the other stars. The Buddha’s chain says it with the same characters: 愛緣取，取緣有. In the West, from Plato to Hegel and Heidegger, love’s movement toward being is good, the sign that we are made for more than we are. For the Buddha the same movement is thirst, the motor of the wheel, and liberation is 涅槃, nirvana, the blowing out of a flame. A second tension follows. Western love insists on the singular. “In romantic love,” Hegel said, “everything turns on the fact that this man loves precisely this woman, and she him.” The Buddha distrusts exactly that “mine.” His highest love, 慈, loving-kindness, is boundless, and one of his best-known discourses describes it with the most exclusive love there is: “Even as a mother would protect with her life her child, her only child, so too for all creatures unfold a boundless heart.”

But the tension is not a border between continents. It runs through each tradition. In the 1590s the Chan monk Zibo Zhenke wrote to Tang Xianzu that 理明則情消, “when principle is clear, feeling dissolves,” and Tang answered that 情有者理必無, “where feeling is, principle must be absent,” and wrote The Peony Pavilion. In Germany Schopenhauer brought the Buddha’s verdict into Western philosophy, and Wagner turned it around. “Wistfully I often look towards the land Nirvana,” he wrote to Mathilde Wesendonck in 1860. “Nirvana in its turn, however, soon changes into Tristan; you know the Buddhist theory of the world’s creation: A breath perturbs the heaven’s translucence,” and here he wrote out the four rising notes of longing from the Prelude, “it swells, condenses, and at last the whole wide world stands forth.” The breath of craving that makes the world is the Tristan chord. And Chikamatsu’s lovers prayed to be reborn together on one lotus, turning the Pure Land, a promise of release from attachment, into the promise of an attachment that would never end. East and West alike took a philosophy of renunciation and made a theology of love-death out of it.

So the deeper unity is this: both traditions distinguish two loves, and they draw the line in the same place. “Two cities have been formed by two loves,” Augustine wrote, “the earthly by the love of self, even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to the contempt of self.” Kierkegaard divided the love that loves its own idea from the love that loves the person it sees. Buddhism divides 愛, the thirst that clings, from 慈悲, kindness and compassion: 大慈與一切眾生樂，大悲拔一切眾生苦, “great kindness gives happiness to all beings; great compassion pulls all beings out of suffering.” What separates kindness from thirst is not that it loves less but that it does not grasp, and the Diamond Sutra has a single line for that: the mind should not dwell on forms, sounds or any object, but 應無所住而生其心, “should give rise to a mind that dwells nowhere.” The Platform Sutra says that Huineng, the sixth patriarch of Zen, was awakened on hearing this line. A mind that dwells nowhere is not a mind that loves nothing. It is a love that does not settle on its image of the other. In the West the line runs between the love that possesses and the love that lets be. In the East it runs between the mind that clings and the mind that dwells nowhere. It is the same line.

大乘 Buddhism gave the line a figure, and the figure is the East’s reply to the Liebestod. The 菩薩, the bodhisattva, is the one who could enter 涅槃, could let the flame go out, and does not, because beings are suffering. His vow is chanted in Zen monasteries to this day: 眾生無邊誓願度, “beings are numberless; I vow to save them all.” Without great kindness and great compassion, says the same treatise that defined them, 便早入涅槃, he would have entered 涅槃 early. Set him beside Isolde. The Liebestod is a love that sinks into the night of the All and leaves the world behind. The bodhisattva is a love that could leave the world and turns back at the shore. Hegel’s spirit finding itself in its dismemberment and the bodhisattva at the edge of extinction choosing to stay are two pictures of the same turning back, and the turning back is what being-in-love as a way of being-in-the-world looks like.

I Will That You Be

I promised to come back to the saying Heidegger called “probably the deepest interpretation of what love is,” amo, volo ut sis. He first wrote it to Hannah Arendt in 1925: “Amo means volo, ut sis, as Augustine once said: I love you, I will that you be what you are.” Arendt, who wrote her dissertation on love in Augustine, used it a quarter of a century later in The Origins of Totalitarianism, of “the great and incalculable grace of love, which says with Augustine, ‘Volo ut sis (I want you to be),’ without being able to give any particular reason for such supreme and unsurpassable affirmation.” But no one has found the words in Augustine’s writings; the saying is Heidegger’s distillation more than a quotation. Whoever first said it, it draws the line between love and the wish. The wish says: I want you to be what I wish. Love says: I will that you be what you are.

Heidegger drew the line himself, in notes from the late 1930s: “‘Love’ is the will that the beloved be, by finding its way to its essence and dwelling in it. Such a will does not wish and does not demand. Honoring, it first lets the lovable ‘become’ the beloved, without, however, creating it.”Heidegger, Besinnung (1938–39): “»Liebe« ist der Wille, daß das Geliebte sei, indem es zu seinem Wesen finde und in ihm wese. Solcher Wille wünscht und fordert nicht. Würdigend läßt er erst das Liebens-würdige als das Geliebte »werden«, ohne es doch zu schaffen.” Buddhist kindness says the same thing in another grammar: 大慈與一切眾生樂, great kindness gives happiness to all beings. Craving says: let it be mine. Kindness says: may it be, and may it be well. Volo ut sis and 應無所住而生其心: at their summits, West and East found the same words for love, a will that the other be, which dwells nowhere and does not demand.

And so I come back to the goose. 問世間，情是何物，直教生死相許. What is this thing, love, that it makes two creatures pledge each other their lives and their deaths? Love is the will that another be, so deep that one’s own being becomes bound to it. To be in love is to be in the world through another’s existence. The world is opened by the fact that you are there, as Heidegger’s joy opened it, and it closes, as it closed for the goose, when you are gone. That is why love and death are never far apart. It is not that love wants death. It is that to love is to have staked one’s being on the being of another. Yearning is that being stretched across distance and time. The Liebestod is that being refusing to outlive its world, and compassion is the same will turned toward every being that suffers.

The Song of Songs says that love is strong as death. Not stronger: as strong. They are equals, which is why they keep meeting. But the next verse says something more: “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.” Isolde sank into the surging swell, and Werther received his death from Lotte’s hands. What the waters cannot quench is not the longing to be loved. It is the will that you be.

Translations. Quotations in English follow these translations: Plato by W. R. M. Lamb and Harold N. Fowler, Aristotle by W. D. Ross, and Augustine by Marcus Dods; Heidegger’s Being and Time by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, and his lectures and seminars by David Farrell Krell, Franz Mayr and Richard Askay, William McNeill, Nicholas Walker and Julia Davis; Schopenhauer by E. F. J. Payne, Hegel by A. V. Miller and T. M. Knox, Kierkegaard by David F. and Lillian Marvin Swenson, Goethe’s memoirs by John Oxenford, Mann’s Death in Venice by Kenneth Burke, Wagner’s letters to Mathilde Wesendonck by William Ashton Ellis, Freud by James and Alix Strachey, and Lacan by Alan Sheridan and Bruce Fink; Tang Xianzu’s preface by Cyril Birch, Chikamatsu by Donald Keene, and the Discourse on Loving-Kindness by Bhikkhu Sujato. All other translations are my own.

Image credits. The photograph of Martin Heidegger is by Willy Pragher (CC BY 4.0), and the photograph of Slavoj Žižek is by Amrei-Marie (CC BY-SA 4.0). The stills from Obsession are © Focus Features, reproduced at reduced size for criticism and commentary. All other images are in the public domain.