Fille asked:

How can we understand that we have fallen in love?

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If we think of philosophical investigations as a learning activity then I think most people would agree
that it is probably a bad thing if the activity kills the pupil.

When the subject of enquiry is one such as this we have to consider how to proceed safely for both
subject and the owner of the question. Philosophical thinking would seem to be the most harmless
activity in the world yet it can be quite harmful in two distinct ways. The first is its tendency to pare
away at an object until it has been reduced to nothing or something quite different from its original
form. Secondly, our thinking can be taken in completely the opposite direction and lead us to over
simple generalisations that leave no scope for tolerance, compromise, revision of ideas or moderate
action.

So given these safety warnings, how should we advise someone to undertake the philosophical
analysis of the concept of love? We might begin by asking a question that could stop us in our tracks,
which is, given the criteria we often attach to knowledge and understanding, is this particular subject
one that it is possible to answer in principle? The question, "when do we know that we are in love"
seems clear and simple but if we restrict our thinking about knowledge of love to a classical
philosophical approach to the subject of knowledge then we shall be forced to demand that only those
objects capable of carrying truth values and in particular only the value 'true' can be objects of
knowledge.

A lover-philosopher of this sort would say that they could only know that they have love when they are
certain that they have true love. The Platonist lover- philosopher restricts their thinking even more and
demands of themselves that the object of love is not simply a true-love but a necessarily true-love.
They would follow this line of thinking, as if they were a very unsubtle automaton and force the view
on themselves that nothing 'in-the-world' can be necessarily true and the only type of things that they
can love are abstract entities that have truth by virtue of their internal form independently of any
material or contingent fact.

While I'm not sure that the Platonists intended to characterise the fault-blind stage of interpersonal
love in their theory of knowledge it does seem to approximate to one phase of the phenomenon. Love
on their terms would be of an idealised individual who's material form represented a sort of
matchmaker's profile that actual individuals fit to a greater or lesser degree. One problem for an
individual, who tries to fit the person they love into such an abstract, unchanging framework is that
real people are very material and guaranteed to change. The holder of such a view then is almost
certain to experience catastrophic dissatisfaction with love themselves sooner or later and probably
induce dissatisfaction in their partner sooner rather than later. In terms of non-destructive testing of
the idea under consideration the approach taken so far to analysing the problem of knowledge of
love, has done no more than introduce into the discussion a truth-based philosophical concept of
knowledge which when applied to love yields a model of some aspect of the experience. The game
being played is one of, what if love were like this, or supposing love is thought of in this way.

Although we should be protective of the ideas and the owners of ideas undergoing philosophical
surgery we can and probably should be quite entertainingly vicious about the techniques or tools we
use for such dissections. So we would be quite justified in raising doubts about the logical possibility
of undertaking any analysis of love in the same way that we can doubt the possibility of ever teaching
an automaton to genuinely have humour until they also have a nervous system, language and cultural
experience that has very little difference to ours. The objection to analysis here is based on the idea
of analysis as reduction in which to analyse something is to identify the parts of which it consists but
at the same time to insist that those parts cannot belong to the same category of thing as the object
of analysis. Under this theory the analysis of as joke would take the constituents of the joke apart but
the parts could not be jokes themselves. As a good example of this look at the end jokes in the British
sitcom, The Vicar of Dibley.

Similarly, he analysis of love must be explained under this theory of analysis in terms of non-love
constituents.

Therein lies an interesting paradox. If a good analysis implies that everything that is true of the object
of analysis must also be true of the parts into which it is analysed then how can what is true of 'A' also
be true of non-A if 'A' and non-A cannot be true at the same time. J.O Urmson an English philosopher
suggested an approach (Philosophical AnalysisOUP 1956) which he called 'same-level analysis'
which had some similarities to the concept of 'explication' Rudolf Carnap advocated (An Introduction
To Symbolic LogicDover) in which the concept of analysis could be understood in the imagery of the
unfolding of a curled up flower, so that the parts and the interconnections that were wrapped up on
the inside of a sphere become visible and separated as the petals containing the parts lay out flat.
The analysis of the parts of the flower do not then require equating to objects that are non-flowers.
Similarly the analysis of love on this model requires only the unfolding of the concepts shielding its
internal working from our view without the requirement to surgically remove them from the living
organism.

Neil Buckland