How to Love a Woman

Hegel on How To Love a Woman:

This post arises out of reading Hegel's philosophy of mind, which makes a fairly extraordinary claim about the nature of passionate love. I'd like to explore it with you.

The claim begins in paragraph 448, on the mental faculty of attention. The issue of attention is that you are free to give it, or not; and therefore, if you are to have a passion, it is because you have chosen to give it your attention.

But what is the thing to which you are giving your attention? It is an idea: and, therefore, it is your idea. After all, it exists in your mind, and the thoughts you have are your own. He offers an example:

Thus we know, for example, that if anyone is able to form a clear picture to himself, say in a poem, of the feelings of joy or sorrow that are overwhelming him he rids himself of the thing that was oppressing his mind and thereby procures for himself relief or complete freedom. For although by contemplating the many aspects of his feelings he seems to increase their power over him, yet he does in fact dimnish this power by making his feelings into something confronting him, something that becomes external to him. Goethe, for instance, particularly in his Werther, brougth himself relief while subjecting the readers of this this romance to the power of feeling.

The book he mentions, The Sorrows of Young Werther, sparked a wave of suicides across Europe. The title character is a suicide, killing himself over losing his love.

Why was his love worth dying over, though? She was an idea -- that is to say, she was not just a girl, with all the problems any individual girl might have. She was an ideal girl: it was his mind which had made her an ideal that was worth dying over.

We remember here our discussion around Chaucer's A Knight's Tale, and the objection raised by female readers that the young knights didn't know -- and therefore could not love -- the lady at all. Hegel seems entirely subject to that line of attack.

But now consider his further remarks on passion.

[P]assion is neither good nor bad; the title only states that a subject has thrown his whole soul -- his interests of intellect, talent, character, enjoyment -- on one aim and object. Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocritical moralizing which inveighs against the form of passion as such.

So to have thrown your whole soul into a vision of beauty, that is passion. To have passion for a woman is, then, not to have some physical longing alone; that belongs to mere appetites, which rank much lower on his scale of mind. Rather, what you have is a longing for an idea of what the woman would be if she were as perfect as you wish her to be.

Well, and she is not; so is this not a lie? And are you not betraying her, if you will not take her as she is rather than demanding some perfection no one can possess?

Here I am reminded of Cassandra's wise words, directed towards men: that biology is not an adequate excuse for bad behavior. It is not what you are that makes you worthy of love, but what you could be; and the fact of trying to be that better thing.

Or we may turn to the Christian admonition to love the sinner, and hate the sin: this is nothing more than to love the idealized vision of the person, separated from their (actual) sin. You are asked to love them not as they are, but as they should be.

Now I wonder if Hegel isn't on to something. I hate to ascribe anything good to German Idealism: but let's talk it over, and see if there isn't something here.