Review - Philosophy of Love
A Partial Summing-Up
by Irving Singer
MIT Press, 2009
Review by Berel Dov Lerner, Ph.D.
May 19th 2009 (Volume 13, Issue 21)

Irving Singer is a prolific philosopher who has devoted most of his career to the philosophy of love.  He is best known for his monumental three volume study, The Nature of Love, which traces Western ideas about love from ancient Greece until recent times.  Philosophy of Love is a much shorter work (120 un-cramped pages of text) and less academically rigorous work.  It covers a tremendous expanse of intellectual territory, including major themes not only from Singer's famous trilogy, but also from his many other works.  It tells us about the great historical confrontation between "courtly" and "romantic love," about Plato's vision of how love can develop from erotic interest in individuals to the spiritual love of ideals, and about the relationship between romanticism and democracy.  Singer also tries to say something substantial about an entire Pantheon of other famous thinkers and artists, including (to name a few) Shakespeare, David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, William James, Jean-Paul Sartre, and the movie director Jean Renoir.  He also offers his views on several topics not directly related to love, such as the future of the humanities and philosophical method. Singer pulls no punches; he is perfectly willing to tell us, for instance, how Plato got things wrong, why love should not be thought of as the merging of individuals into a new whole, and that Freud placed too much emphasis on sex. 

The book is prefaced with a laudatory foreword by Alan Soble, another leading figure in the academic sub-discipline of the philosophy of love.  Soble extols it, saying that if a student came to him today expressing an interest in the philosophy of love and sex, he would tell them it is the very first thing they should read (followed by Singer's famous trilogy).  I am not sure that I would concur.  As should be clear from the previous paragraph, it would take nothing short of a miracle of editorial prowess and logical structure for a volume this slim to say something useful to the uninitiated about the myriad topics and thinkers it covers.  Unfortunately, as Singer admits, the book developed out of radio interviews, which accounts for its "colloquial character," "unstructured format," and "occasionally amorphous framework" (pg. xv).  You can tell there will be problems right from the start, when Singer jumps into a discussion of whether romantic love is a modern idea without first going to the trouble of explaining what he means by "romantic love" and how it differs from "courtly love."  The book continues in an uneven pace, always clearly written but assuming very different levels of background knowledge from the reader at different points in the discussion.  Sometimes Singer will throw off his opinion on a complicated issue without supplying much in the way of argument.  While he does mention the titles of the major works being discussed and he also tells us in which of his own books further details can be found, Philosophy of Love has no footnotes or other bibliographical citations.  Pity the poor undergraduate who has learned from Singer that somewhere in the midst of its hundreds of pages, Sartre's Being and Nothingness has something interesting to say about sex!  Furthermore, the history of the philosophy of love (outside of his own work) seems to have ended for Singer around 1950.  That means no feminist thought, no postmodernism, and no analytic philosophy of love (including, ironically, the work of Alan Soble!) is included.  In other words, most of today's "hottest" ideas about love are left untouched.  All of this detracts from the book's usefulness as a beginner's guide to the field.

In conclusion: Philosophy of Love is so clearly written and full of ideas that even newcomers to its topic should have no trouble getting through its few pages and learning some important things along the way.  However, its most appreciative readers will be those who are already well acquainted with Singer's writings and want to get a sense of how his ideas developed through time and how his many writings hang together in something like an integrated world view.

© 2009 Berel Dov Lerner

Berel Dov Lerner teaches philosophy at the Western Galilee College in Israel.