"Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds."

She, to whom this was quoted on an occasion auspicious for argument, said, "That is not so. Love alters fitfully; alters even in the absence of alteration in the loved one."

He replied, "I should go further in the opposite direction. Love is not love that alters regardless of any circumstances. That which a person has ever loved he cannot fail always to love. Should he find that he no longer loves, he has found that he really never loved."

"You seem to be contradicting obvious facts, or else I do not understand you. Certainly you admit that most men fall in and out of love frequently and with great ease. Does that mean that they have never loved at all? If so, love must be a very rare thing; for who has loved in a way untouched by fickleness or infidelity?"

"To love properly is undoubtedly rare. I admit that, and am not ignoring the facts. I avoid contradicting them by saying that if men fall in and out of love, love this person now and then another, then that is not what I mean by love."

"But it does not seem intelligent to me to define love in such a manner that most human beings are incapable of it. When I say that I love you or anybody else it may happen to be, I am reporting, honestly and sincerely for the time being, a state of my feelings. But feelings are of all things transient; desires pass in the night, and one awakes in the morning with new hopes and new susceptibilities. Is it not clear that I may love tomorrow other than what I loved today?"

"As you use the word love, what you say seems true. If love is an affair of the emotions, of feeling and desire, I should agree with you concerning its inevitable transiency. Love so conceived would be dependent upon the body, not in the vulgar sense, but in the sense in which it can be said that the body active is the soul. Love, if it is an affair in the world of bodies, whatever be their ultimate analysis into nervous systems and glands, love so conditioned would, of course, could not fail, in fact, to alter as its conditions altered."

"You seem to understand me. When one feels that one is in love, that feeling is probably due to all the circumstances you have mentioned. One desires to possess the object of one's desire to the full extent of one's desire; and love persists in such a situation until the desire changes or perishes. You understand this well enough, and yet you seem unwilling to accept this use of the word love. It seems to be the only kind of love that takes place among human beings; what use to conceive love in any other fashion?"

"This use, that whatever the facts of human psychology be, it is important to distinguish two conceptions of love that are usually confused in our conversations about it. When I assert that love cannot alter, I am referring to a certain possible relation between human beings. I believe that human beings are capable of loving in this way, and I should go further and say that they are only genuinely lovers when they love in this manner. The thing which you call love -- the emotional state, the feelings, the desires -- is love if it is united with, or partakes of, the state of mind which I call love."

"You must not be arbitrary about your definitions; the way you use the word isn't the only way in which it can be used properly. But I should like to understand your usage. Do you define love as a state of mind?"

"No, that would not be quite accurate. What I mean is simply this. We agree that love is the desire to possess the object loved. But we disagree about the manner in which objects are possessed. You seem to think that we possess them in some physical, social, or emotional way. I think that we only possess what we know. This, I suppose, is Platonism, and that would probably condemn it in your eyes. But consider for a moment what is implied. Knowledge is love in so far as knowledge is the possession of its object, I am talking, perhaps, of a certain kind of knowledge, knowledge in which one is united with the object known. It is the way in which one beholds essences, qualities, forms, ideas, not the way in which one knows things. If one ever loves an object in this sense, one thoroughly possesses it, and since essences, qualities, forms and so forth, are eternal things, are out of time entirely, they cannot change, and therefore one's possession of them is an eternal thing. Duration is really irrelevant to love. If I have ever loved you in this sense, if I have ever possessed you as a certain essence, you might change actually, but the "you" which I once loved, this "essence" of you, could not change, and I would therefore always love it."

"You quibble. When you talk this way it is quite clear to me that it is not me, me as a person, whom you love. You love your own ideas. God forbid that they should ever change. You impose upon me your own ideal conception, you try to make it more real and objective by calling it my essence, as if you perceived this essence in me, rather than surrounded me with your own fancies. This essence is what you love and possess when you behold or contemplate. If I rebel, and change my person in relation to you, so radically that it is no longer congenial, even to a Platonist, to identify these essences with me, you cease to love me, the real me that I am acquainted with myself, and perhaps turn elsewhere. You find some other woman who submits to your intellectual witchcraft; the idealization again works for a while; you affix the beloved essences to her person, or delude yourself into believing that they were already there; and then claim that since the essences have not changed, you love the same object. And this could go on through endless such mutations. The only thing that does not seem to change, as far as I can see, is your own set of ideas; and it might be better if they did!"

"That is exactly the point -- even though you don't seem to enjoy recognizing it. Though I may change from person to person, I am monogamously married to the essences I love -- or if it suits you better, to my own ideals. It is clear to me that if love is the desire to possess, these essences or ideals are the only things I can genuinely possess. I possess them when I contemplate them, and contemplation of this sort is love. When I love you and then somebody else and then somebody else, it is always the same thing I love, though in different persons, and although you think that I surround the particular person with my own ideals, you must admit that the reason why, of all the persons in the world, I am capable of loving only a few, is because only a few are susceptible to this idealization, or as I prefer to put it, only a few persons manifest the essences I love. I did not maintain, remember, that love is always the love of the same person. I said rather that love does not alter -- it is always love in the same way of the same object. And now it must be clear to you that the object loved is not a person, but some quality of a person, which that person either has accidentally or essentially. If the quality is accidental to the person's nature, it is probable that it will not be durable therein, and love will have to find another person. But if the quality is of the very essence of that person's nature, love will probably be of that person unto death."

"What you say is good poetry, good Platonism; but I am unable to ignore biology. I am a body, and it seems to me that my functioning, in love and other things, can be described entirely in biological and psychological terms, without any of this apparatus of qualities and essences, accidental natures and essential natures. And when I am so described, and my love is so described, both I and it can obviously change. In short, love seems to me to be entirely an accident, but one which unfortunately you will never experience in your pure contemplation of ethereal essences. Say that the love of essences or that the love of God never changes, but don't say it of the love of woman; and being only a woman, that was what I was interested in talking about."

"You accuse me rightly of being a Platonist; but you seem to think that that means being a fool. I do not pretend to be a disembodied spirit moving among wraiths, I do not wish to kiss a ghostly essence. To love God apart from a woman may be possible, but I am not sure I care for it; but in loving a woman I wish to be able to love God. There may be many women, but God is one, and since it is God that I love in each of them, my love does not change. But if you insist upon talking only in the realms of biology and psychology, then I suppose you are right, for biological and psychological discourse describes only accidents, causes, and effects in the world of bodies. But if you could only see that body and soul were one, then you would see that though love changes as accidental conditions change, love in essence remains the same. That I love you as a person is certainly due to a whole series of accidents, adequately described by a biologist and a psychologist; but if I love you as a person properly, my love, though occasioned accidentally, is of your essence. If you change, you simply are no longer the person that I loved. My love hasn't changed; you have."

"You could not love me, dear, so much, loved you not -- I suppose, essences the more!"

"Don't mock. Don't you understand me?"

"Perhaps, I am not sure. I am certain only that we are talking about different things. Love as I understand it undoubtedly changes, and there is no reason why it shouldn't, and every reason why it should. You don't deny that. As you define love you may be right about its eternality. Only your definition of love seems to me to be purely verbal. You build up a fabric of ideas and distinctions, in terms of which your conviction that love should not change may be held. I understand what you say; but as far as the facts go."

"As far as the facts go, I love you, and there is nothing more to be said about it."

He kissed her. She remained silent. They rested in understanding, or perhaps beyond it.

The proposition that "love is not love that alters when it alteration finds" provokes discourse between a Platonist and a woman, the one affirming, the other denying the proposition. Their argument develops two utterly disparate notions of love. In terms of the one, it is not true that love is incapable of alteration; in terms of the other, it is not true that love is love if it alters. The facts do not sustain either the denial or the affirmation of the proposition; the only facts that are relevant to this discourse are the emotions and desires of the two parties concerned. They are not relevant in the sense that they in any way determine the abstract intelligibility or validity of the contrary assertions concerning love; but only in the sense that they may have been casually responsible in generating the fundamental difference in attitude, temperament and insight which made the discussion the discussion of a genuine option. The controversy itself did not express these differences, although it may have reflected them. What it expressed was a conflict between two partial realms of discourse, and all the intellectual ramifications, the ideas and distinctions to which this conflict gave rise. The fact of love may have started the discussion, just as, perhaps, it ended it; but the discussion was concerned with the definitions of love, and although ended, it was not concluded in the sense of being resolved.

This instance of discourse illustrates a common trait of human conversations. In the course of controversy the realization often occurs to the disputants that they are arguing about two different things, and when they realize that their only difference seems to be that they have used the same word for dissimilar, and even contrary, signification's, they agree. But this is merely the opening of dialectic, rather than its conclusion. Only clarification has been accomplished, not resolution.

In the present instance, the discussion was clarified by the distinction made between the love described by the biologist and the psychologist and the love described by the Platonist. Love, of course, having been defined differently in these two universes of discourse, it was love in two different senses that was being discussed, and the contrary assertions being made about it, could both be made validly in one or the other of these two universes of discourse. Contrary assertions were not made about "love" taken in the identically same sense.

But in the course of this discussion a number of distinctions were made that brought the two universes of discourse into conflict, stated in the dialectical question that was not, but should have been, asked: "What does it mean to love both as a body and as a soul"? Distinctions had been made between essence and existence, between the unchanging qualities of a person and highly volatile personality whose attributes they are, between accidental circumstances and essential relationships, between the body and the soul, between action and knowledge, between knowledge of things and the contemplation of essences, between projecting one's ideal construction onto the object and perceiving the ideal, or form, resident therein, between the world of time and change and a realm out of time and unalterable. Love, although partially defined in one or another of these opposed conceptions, was said to occur in both realms simultaneously. This was intended by the statement that one loved not God apart, but God through woman, not disembodied essences, but essences exhibited in an individual. Agreement may have been reached concerning two possible ways of defining love and with regard to two assertions that could be made of love when so doubly defined. But it would have required a much more arduous and prolonged dialectic to resolve the difficulty created by this double definition. For if it is asserted, as it was, that love may be a single entity, which has in part both the meanings which two definitions ascribe to it, then the original opinions that love changes and does not change, are again in conflict, and this conflict can only be resolved by a definition of love which will combine the other two definitions. In order to accomplish this resolution, love must be understood in such a way that a biologist and a Platonist will agree, not that they are talking of different things, but that they are talking of the same thing, which both changes and is eternal, and that they understand the sense in which it changes, and the sense in which it is everlasting. To arrive at this understanding would be a feat of dialectic, the establishment of translation between two universes of discourse that have been long asunder.

It is possible, on the other hand, that a discourse on love between a woman and a Platonist could never be resolved except in a manner suitable to the woman. But the Platonist would realize that action of any sort was the abandonment, rather than the abolition, of the distinctions which had been created in discourse.

* From Mortimer Adler's first book Dialectic (1927)

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