What are erotic love, sexual love, passionate love, (and) romantic love?

Are they phenomena which resist any and all investigation? A scientist, or a philosopher, surely cannot answer this question in the affirmative. To romanticise love beyond the realm of any comprehension must surely be a last resort, not a taken-for-granted starting point.

Well then, one ought to try examining these phenomena, for their nature, and even for their rationality. And without assuming that they are reductively eliminatable.

And of course, this has been tried; even, possibly, done. Most recently, for instance, in Alain de Botton’s lovely discursive-philosophical novel, ‘Essays in love’. De Botton draws on the philosophies of Aristotle and Nietzsche, among others, to consider in some detail some of the nature of and apparently-inevitable paradoxes of modern romantic love, for instance that:

Who, what, or how, indeed. ... But perhaps one unexpected yet, when one considers it, tantalisingly promising means of carrying out such an investigation has never yet been thorough-goingly taken up, or (to my knowledge) even thought up, not even by the likes of de Botton. That is: why not investigate the nature and rationality of erotic love and related concepts and phenomena by analogy with the methodology of investigations of the nature and rationality of the most rational pursuits known to humankind, the sciences?

Why should this be promising? Because a great deal of important work has been done in recent decades investigating these most rational of investigations, human beings’ scientific investigations, and some of this work may, if only by contrast, be distinctively relevant to investigating that ‘least rational’ of human endeavours, practices and investigations, love. But particularly, possibly, those meta-scientific investigations which have found themselves arguing or finding that scientific investigations do not, after all, conform as we had expected to our pre-investigatory canons of rationality?

(And moreover, of course, there is the very long tradition of the love of truth and the passion for knowledge in or at the heart of (many traditional explications of) science’s nature and importance. Such explications may have been challenged by the historical sociology and philosophy of science, but they may in certain respects have been strengthened too in the long run; for one can perhaps cope better with coupling the ideas of love and passion with science if one is not fixated on the latter’s sometime pretensions to cold rationality and serious objectivity. But this thought is, for now, ahead of the chase; we shall return to it only later.)

Again, a sceptic might easily enquire: Why should this approach to love be promising, if love and science as much as seem at oppposite ends of a spectrum? A philosophical investigation of love: how should/could it (possibly) profit from a proper conceptualisation of science? Well, I will stick no longer to abstract thoughts and tentative intimations on the matter, and instead say this: that, most simply, it is because the most cursory reflections on the philosophy of science in this century quickly start to deliver. We get a payoff, from thinking of erotic love as philosophy of science.

Where better to begin, in showing this, than with the most influential recent philosopher of the sciences, Thomas Kuhn. Arguably, the most enduring (because quite revolutionary yet not proven wrong) legacy of Kuhn’s most well-known work may be the concept of ‘normal science’:

The last point is key. Normal science is progressive, cumulative -- but only because it rides on the back of a taken-for-granted, not-fully-understood set of presumptions, unchallenged and accepted ways of acting (of practising the science in question), and exemplars of what good scientific practice and successful problem-solving in the field in question are. To grasp Kuhn’s philosophy of science it is essential to grasp this aspect of his conception of the priority of paradigms -- that scientific revolutions are absolutely the exception and not the rule, such that most science is cumulative and progressive to if anything an even greater degree than the classical (pre-Kuhnian) traditions in the Philosophy of Science would have us believe, given only their non-rational basis in/on a paradigm.

It is scientific revolutions for which Kuhn is famous -- but these are only the rare ruptures that lay the ‘foundation’ for what almost all science is: normal science. Normal puzzle-solving science is in central respects ‘humdrum’ and ‘conservative’. It does not boldly seek out reasons for the possible wrongness of the paradigm on which it is based.

A question, then: Might our image of (erotic) love, the accepted standard image that permeates much of contemporary Western culture, of erotic love etc. as wild and untamable and knowing no bounds etc.; might this traditional image be wrong? Specifically: As Kuhn argued that science is generally conservative, given only the basis of it not being founded on objective knowledge of the true word-world or theory-world connections, might it be wise of us to consider whether much of love may not also be similarly conservative, routine, solid, developmental and yet without solidly ‘objective’ or ‘rational’ foundations if we are to give those terms their traditional meanings? The image of Romeo and Juliet, or of Camille Claudel, or of Don Juan, or Mata Hari, or even of Tereza and Tomas, Franz and Sabina: should these, should it, be displaced in favour of something much more... normal? Is it an infelicitous image, which needs replacing by the mundanity, by the happy-enough everydayness, of ‘normal love’?

In support of such a suggestion, one might cite many authorities none of which have used the Kuhnian schema in this context, but some of which have fairly decisively, to my mind, undercut the romantic image of love, without undercutting love itself. [We might want to ask here: Is ‘the romantic image’ of love part of our manifest image of the world? Without wishing to endorse the ideology of ‘the scientific image’ as foundational, it seems to me fairly reasonable to argue ‘No’. The romantic image partially constitutes the manifest image, and thus the (manifest) reality, just because of its power in many people’s thinking; but it also partly occludes that reality, as for instance Feminist Theorists have in some instances efficaciously argued. We shall return to this point.] Erich

Fromm’s book ‘The art of loving’, and Robert Solomon’s book ‘About Love’, are paradigm examples that I would cite in support of the Kuhn-ish line here. These writers have anticipated the contemporary theorists of the emotions who, rightly, make central to their ‘theories’ the notion that emotions are not merely feelings, and that no crude empiricism or emotivism of emotions will be satisfactory. Rather, a sophisticated understanding of love as something real and present in (some of) our lives, but yet as something deep and temporally extended, and as something we do, is required.

And they were all anticipated by Wittgenstein, in remarks such as the following:

Solomon adds a useful metaphor to our re-understanding of the concept of love hereabouts: he speaks of ‘walking in love’ as being a more appropriate constitutive metaphor than ‘falling in love’. Walking is more paradigmatically human than falling; it is more normal. As Laurie Anderson’s marvellously surreal ‘song’, "Walking and falling", exemplifies effectively, I think, only a somewhat warped mind will, ‘poetically’, insist that the two are not to be rather clearly set apart from one another:

and I was looking for you

but I couldn’t find you;

I wanted you

and I was looking for you

all day

but I couldn’t find you

I couldn’t find you;

You’re walking

and you don’t always realize it

but you’re always falling;

with each step you’re falling

and then catching yourself

from falling;

over and over

you’re falling

and then catching yourself

from falling;

and this is how

you can be walking and falling

at the same

time ...

The haunting beauty of this sits intriguingly with its essential strangeness and quirkiness. And one ought surely to conclude somewhat soberly: Walking is the paradigm; there can only be falling with walking presumed, part of the accepted background. It is obsessional to find oneself always falling. It need be no part of wanting, needing, loving; even if it is humanly a very common part...

The picture, if we truly want to develop a Kuhnian philosophy of love, must of course be more complex than a simple emphasis on ‘normal love’ would indicate. We were used, before Kuhn, to thinking of science as a matter of great minds dramatically finding out new facts and facilitating novel true(r) theories; as we have noted, Kuhn radicalised this picture in two directions, not only by suggesting that the revolutionary ruptures were so drastic as to be non-rational, but also by suggesting that most of science has nothing to do with such ruptures and revolutions, but is instead routine behaviour of an exceedingly and sometimes tediously rational type. But it is of course scientific revolution, rather than the near-ubiquity of normal science, which has tended more to bewitch Kuhn’s ‘followers’, and to make him famous and much-beloved among ‘Post-Modernists’ etc. . (This is in part perhaps because some of those on the ‘Left’ fringe of traditional philosophy of science, notably Feyerabend (and also some Lyotardian ‘Post-Modernists’ and advocates of ‘Chaos Theory’ etc.), have taken as much umbrage at the concept of normal science as have those further ‘Right’, such as the Popperians. If one looks at ‘Criticism and the growth of knowledge’, for instance, this being surely the premier document of Kuhn meeting his detractors, one finds, remarkably, the notion of ‘scientific revolution’ itself being given a comparitively easy ride from a variety of Kuhn’s critics. It’s ‘normal science’ that the Popperians hate most.)

So then, a question perhaps inevitably forces itself onto our attention, when we think of Kuhn, and of love: What if we think of shifts from one love to another as paradigm-shifts?

Well one slight but not insignificant difference we notice immediately is that one does not have to shift from one love to another. A cooling-off period is often recommended. According to Kuhn, scientific progress standardly does not have a place for -- or cannot handle -- such a cooling-off. A paradigm will only give way once its accumulated anomalies render an incipient replacement immediately arguable-for.

Thus Kuhn’s world of worlds of science cannot quite be our world of worlds of love. For in the latter, there is no compulsion to move directly to another paradigm, another partner. (Unless one cheats slightly by deciding to count celibacy or whatever as itself analogous to another partner -- one decides to love oneself, or to love the absence of love?)

But the claim of incommensurability may provide closer parallels (and indeed may recuperate the relevance of the claim -- that all science happens within a paradigm -- to erotic love; I will turn to this momentarily.). Is one partner always commensurable with another? Indeed, is one (partner) ever truly commensurable with another?

One can, for example, list the qualities of one’s past, present or possible future loves, in an effort to decide between them. But two things:

1) Love itself cannot feature as an item on the list, without begging the key questions at issue. Or, to be more precise, love is a descriptor of a quite different nature from most of the other items possibly on the list (Such as ‘does dishes regularly’, ‘has great family’ (There may be items on the list, such as ‘is very beautiful’, which seem less deeply different from love -- but that will be, when convincing, due to an ‘internal relation’ to love. For instance, there is no objective assessing of beauty -- the face of a loved one is transfigured, from how it is for others, and for how it was for one in the past, and will perhaps again be for one in the future)). For loving is not something observable, or even strictly constructible.

This leads into the following point:

2) One always, of course, creates such a list at a particular place, a particular time. One can assess the qualities of one’s loves only from a position of being in love with one or more of them (in which case one can hardly make an ‘objective’ assessment, can one?), or from a position of not being in love (in which case, one is surely not in any position to be an authority on love?). The upshot of these polemical points must be: traditional conceptions of ‘objectivity’ do not apply properly to assessing love. But this, of course, is just what has been taught us by Kuhn. Traditional conceptions of objectivity cannot enable us to do good history of science, cannot enable us to see the development of science as it actually is and was. For among others things, such conceptions fatally envision a ‘view from nowhere’ of scientific progress. Whereas the point is that we do and can only assess a paradigm from within a paradigm (Even the non-Whiggish historian or anthropologist of science cannot escape this constraint, a fact which notoriously leads in turn to difficulties in Kuhn & co. explaining from whence they are able to tell their supposedly true and purportedly non-imperialist stories of the history of science. ).

The traditional picture which Kuhn overturned was fatally flawed because it failed to understand that the idea of our not being committed to -- ‘in love with’ -- our current paradigm left us ‘nowhere’, left us for instance not only effectively not within any scientific community, but not having any way of understanding the facts that previously one had supposed could decide between paradigms... . On a traditional model of rationality and objectivity, there is no neutral way of choosing between paradigms at the moment of decision. As Kierkegaard long ago intimated to us, and from (in part bitter) personal experience, this is as true for love (including love of God) as it is for (scientific) knowledge.

And, as the Symbolic Interactionist school in Sociology have taught us, we too are part of the process here. When we ‘do’ gender we continue to contribute to an (ongoing) modification of what gender is. Likewise, when we ‘do’ love. Or again, when we ‘do’ science...

This brings us, of course, directly to ‘Seeing-as’. The most vital section of Kuhn’s discussion in connection with the present topic is where he makes clear that there is no alternative to seeing a phenomenon one way or another; there is no seeing, in science, outside of a paradigm. And this is true of love too, arguably, in the following sense: one sees someone as lovable, or indeed as having a common project (of love) with one, in a manner which cannot be entirely explicated even through supervenience relations. That is, one’s attitude toward the person must be one of love; no consideration of their qualities in an ‘objective’ manner can possibly lead into loving them, or even constitute its continuance. One either sees someone as a lover, or as a non-lover; one cannot intelligibly consider a someone and then decide whether one is in love with them or not, nor even (for all the truth in Fromm and Solomon and Sartre) simply to decide to walk into love with them (or not). Just as one cannot, for Kuhn, look at the phenomena to decide whether it is oxygen or dephlogisticated air that one is observing. And any theory super-added to the observations is ‘just more theory’.

Indeed, an upshot of our discussion, put so as to emphasize its counter-intuitiveness (and yet, what is wrong with it?), is this: the scientist in Kuhn’s picture, as soon as ‘he’ pushes anywhere near to the boundaries of research, has if anything even less room for objectivity and rationality, even less possibility of seeking some kind of external check on what ‘he’ is seeing/thinking, than the lover (who can at least talk to friends, compare the beloved’s character etc. to that of others), or than the witness to a shape-shifting gestalt (who can at least easily find other vocabularies, other words in which to describe the lines on the paper): "With scientific observation...the situation is exactly reversed [from how it is in the case of a standard visual gestalt]. The scientist can have no recourse above or beyond what he sees with his eyes and instruments. If there were some higher authority by recourse to which his vision might be shown to have shifted, then that authority would itself become the source of his data, and the behaviour of his vision would become a source of problems..." . The lover at least has the notional opportunity of trying to stand outside her paradigm, on the rough ground of Being-single, or sexing without love. Whereas the scientist does so -- the scientist ‘steps outside’ a paradigm -- only at the risk of no longer being able to be a scientist at all.

In sum: there is an important sense in which, at the crucial moments, science (á la Kuhn) is arguably less rational than love.

Now Paul Feyerabend has suggested as strongly as anyone, among other things, that Kuhn over-stated the extent to which a scientist is ever in thrall to a paradigm, or at least the extent to which a scientist ought to be so thralled. Even the vague and abstract ‘rules’ of method and community intimated by Kuhn (or Fleck, or Bachelard, or Duhem) were too much for him.

No, in Feyerabend, Kuhn’s fellow incommensurabilist, but otherwise with quite a different picture of science and human life... in Feyerabend, what we have is a landscape of rampant promiscuity. We have anything going; and perhaps thus everything staying including even astrology and the like, and (perhaps) the proliferation of more and more hundreds of flowers.

The Kuhnian lover ought to be aware of the paradigm-‘bound’ nature of her love as a constituent element of its actuality; the Kuhnian understands that over-valuation is as ‘rational’ as you can get, usually, where love or (especially) science is concerned. The Kuhnian lover is not afraid then to make what a Popperian would deridingly term ‘ad hoc hypotheses’ about the beloved, for the Kuhnian lover realizes that if one were to try endlessly to falsify one’s love, then (even more obviously than that in science all theories are born refuted) one might as well say that all loves are born refuted -- and that would not be a sensible thing to say, if one wants to give one’s life (love) any chance at all...

By contrast, the Feyerabendian lover has little time for normal love or partnership; rather, she seeks to bloom rampantly, to maximize her iconoclastic and heroic forays into the world... But can this be love at all? Or does Feyerabend describe for us only sex, and does the Feyerabendian ‘lover’ demand only Millian negative liberty, rather than Sandelian togetherness or Kierkegaardian committment? (We must include here the liberty of the scientist vis-a-vis method, and the liberty of the society, vis-a-vis science (Whether there is a strict contradiction here -- and whether even if there is that is fatal -- is a question for Feyerabend scholars which we cannot pursue further at present.). The Feyerabendian promiscuous erotic-lover-as-philosopher-of-science will presumably likewise demand freedom of sexual practices -- AND the right of society not to be dominated by the demands for funding etc. of the ideologically dominant erotic ethos?!)

Perhaps Lakatos will prove more fruitful to the human exigencies of love, less demanding than is Feyerabend with his anarchism and the dizzying lack of committment it implies.

The deepest problems with Lakatos’s alternative programme -- of ‘research programmes’ -- are generally taken to be that

(1) It has difficulty accounting for the actual nature of scientific change, as demonstrated by the complexity and gerrymanderedness of Lakatos’s own historical reconstructions of episodes in the history of science; and that

(2) It is supposed to have, but in actual fact lacks, any normative status, given that one is ‘epistemically closed’ from knowledge as to whether any given research programme at any given time is progressing or degenerating -- i.e., on whether it is temporarily in a degenerative stage of a more general progression, or vice versa.

Now, (2) is more deeply a problem of principle, one exploited brillinatly in the critques of Lakatos made by Feyerabend among others. It is a problem that finds a very real existential parallel in love. E.g. Is a love degenerating, not advancing one’s own individuation in concert with one’s partner’s, if things appear that way; or is the ‘research programme’ of one’s exploration of the other and of life with and through the other merely in a temporary bad patch (i.e. ‘in a degenerating phase of a progressive programme’)? There seem no solid answers available to such questions, no humanly determinable and actionable bases on which to proceed. But yet proceed one must. One cannot not be in a ‘research programme’; one must choose one or another, or one is out of the game. Be that game science, or love.

"But cannot one choose not to be in love at all, not to be in a relationship at all?" Well, as we discussed in relation to Kuhn, this does seem to SOME extent to be a relevant disanalogy between the philosophy of erotic love and the philosophy of science (at least á la Kuhn or Lakatos). But once again, appearances may at least in part deceive, as we have already hinted. For the point is not that one can choose not to be involved in love at all (leaving aside for the moment the degree to which personal/existential(-ist) choice is here, according to some, impossible); the point is that one has to choose in a way that may indeed be constrained by ‘rationality’, but is CERTAINLY not determined by it (And in fact, even to allow that things can be thus put is to imply, what I do not accept, that we ought to speak of rationality in actuality as not presupposing exactly the kind of committment(s) exemplified by love -- see the discussion of Harding, and of James, below).

That is to say: there is never a position, whether one is engaged in or is outside of any particular erotic/romantic ‘research programme’, from which one can survey the possible research programmes around one or even the research programme that one is in and determine its long-term viability/progressivity. If there were such a position, then one of course would hardly need to be doing the research... . If one knew where love was going, one would be there already... . Thus -- in love, as in science -- the key point, that Lakatos helps us to see (but that simultaneously strictly limits the effective functionality and normativity of his theory), is that one is always already caught up in a ‘research programme’ whose direction and rationality is in significant part closed to one. Even the ‘null’ research programme has this same status...

So far, we have focussed on the rationality of love, its modes of change, etc. . And we have discovered, I think, some quite salient points of serious overlap between the philosophy in practice of love, and the practicist philosophies of science. Even, that some of the apparent paradoxes of any attempted investigation of love, including by a lover, are mirrored or ‘pre-figured’ in extreme difficulties inevitably encountered in the effort to essay a -- any -- coherent philosophy of science. But let us switch for a moment, not to consider love in its essence (an immense undertaking, one too large for the present context), so much as to consider the importance of the phenomenon of love in its materiality, and in its (sometimes) newness. What am I getting at? I am thinking particularly of Ian Hacking’s influential post-Kuhnian work of the last 15 years or so, and of his important book, ‘Representing and Intervening’. In this book, he argues that questions of the rationality of our methods, and of the correctness of our representations, have unduly dominated Anglo-American philosophy of science. He suggests, by contrast, an emphasis on the actual interventions in the world made by scientists, on the salience of equipment and laboratory to the nature of science, on the ‘instrumental’ reality yielded by the presupposition of various entities used to investigate others which are the objects of one’s experiment, on the newness -- the unprecedentedness -- of the phenomena importantly created by such means, and on differences between the sciences which become evident only when these matters, as opposed to purely representational facets of scientific practices, are explicitly considered.

And what then, of love? What would a Hackingian -- an ‘Experimental Realist’ -- philosophy of love look like?

Well, we would leave behind some of the impasses of Love considered as Representation or Idea (‘Will’ would be more promising, as we shall see below...), and focus instead (e.g.) on what can be done with love. What does love make possible that otherwise is left undone? More specifically, if (the unquestioned discourse of) spraying positrons at something is better proof positive ‘evidence’ of their reality than any theoretical proof of their existence, or even of their attributes, then ought we to say the same of love? E.g. Is true devotion or attraction or what-have-you to be found only in (the discourse of?) their employment to do other things? The interesting general question that is at hand here is this: What is it to prove the reality of one’s love? Is it something that can be done ‘directly’?

In the Foucaultian question signified by the parenthetical mentions of "discourse"above, however, lies the rub. If we don’t speak of positrons when we (supposedly) spray them, then they could just as well be something else. But if our speaking of them is crucial, then there remains an element of what is worth calling (after Pickering et al) ‘‘social’ construction’ of the facts here, even in physical science. The kind of dynamically nominalistic process that Hacking has so fascinatingly described in the social and psychological sciences, for instance in his book ‘Re-writing the soul: Multiple Personality Disorder and the Sciences of Memory’, will then seem very definitely to be operative, at least vestigially, in the physical sciences too.

But ironically, this again gives us yet closer parallels between the cases of love and science than we would pre-reflectively have supposed possible, I think. If the real proof-positive of positrons is unreflective talk of their employment in other scientific proceedures, then so much closer than one might have imagined, perhaps, is real proof-positive of (say) devotion, construed now as its unreflective ‘employment’ in the ‘proceedures’ of love. That is, someone not engaged in fraud, who simply routinely expresses and enacts their devotion to another -- is this not a sensible paradigm of and for love?

What could be a better candidate ‘natural kind’ than "positron", and what could be a better ‘human kind’ than "act of devotion"? But yet our Hackingian analysis barely distinguishes between them.

An Experimental Realist erotic lover will delight in this, and will presumably go on to emphasize the creation of new phenomena in love relationships (e.g. connections and emotions of a nature that has never been seen before, new Foucaultian economies of pleasure and pain and so forth...)...

Hacking’s take on science has of course been influenced importantly by among others the classical U.S. Pragmatist tradition. Now, Pragmatistic views on the philosophy of science are surely in and of themselves promising candidates for finding analogies to the nature of erotic love. For they focus on what works, and bracket the question of correspondence with a fully pre-existing reality. If we are not hardline Platonists about love, this must surely be a fruitful model.

William James’s ideas are perhaps particularly promising. Consider his famous essay, "The will to believe" (which, as he later acknowledged, would have been slightly better titled "The right to believe"). If in our committment to a set of beliefs about the world, there must be an unavoidable element of will -- or, better, one has a right to believe that which is not ‘absolutely proven’ -- then so much more, surely in love. The Jamesian lover, rather like the Kuhnian, will not be worried about Logical Empiricist concerns over whether we have adequately ‘confirmed’ our loving or our belovedness; still less by Popperian qualms about one not having the right to believe anything, but only having the duty to attempt to find out that one’s conjectures are false. The right to love (the ‘leap of faith’ that lovers -- quite reasonably -- make) is evident and obvious for the Jamesian.

However, it might be objected that it is not quite above-the-belt to look to James, to Pragmatism, for analogies between philosophical thought about science on the one hand and love on the other -- for the Pragmatists self-consciously structured much of their thought around what was humanly possible and actual, what made sense and worked for ‘us’. (This is especially true for James) Could it in fact possibly have turned out that their thought about our scientific practices did not connect with reasonable thought about our ways of love? Perhaps we should be quite unsurprised and even unimpressed that erotic love can be quite easily considered as Pragmatist philosophy of science.

Thinking of Pragmatism, and also of Kuhn, perhaps turns us toward Feminist Philosophy of Science. Again, it will hardly be a surprise if Feminism turns out to have some insights on love as well as on science -- in this case, because Feminism of course originated out of reflection on matters gendered and sexed. But one important and distinctive voice in contemporary Feminst Philosophy of Science nevertheless deserves some of our particular attention here: I am thinking of Sandra Harding.

Harding’s central contribution has been the idea of "strong objectivity". That is: unlike some ‘Post-Modernists’ and some ‘Cultural Feminists’ -- unlike hardline ‘Anti-Essentialists’ and Feminist ‘Essentialists’ alike --, she does not wish, in the wake of various deep challenges to ‘Enlightenment / scientific rationality’, simply to abandon or attack science, rationality, or objectivity, as anti-woman, or anti-human, as hopelessly-compromised, or intrinsically-problematic. She insists on the deep value and importance of science and rationality -- for example, for the purposes of being able to prove sexists wrong. But she insists also that the extent to which science has been compromised -- has been sexist etc. -- has often been overly ‘apologised’ for, and under-recognized. Thus she advocates that the project of rendering science non-sexist needs to have not just the traditional but a strengthened idea of objectivity on hand, to carry it through. Here is one of many examples that Harding gives:

And thus to explicate the meaning and salience of ‘strong objectivity’:

An understanding of knowing as requiring a full understanding of interactive effects, and of possible biases of the knower -- that sounds like a good scheme for someone not wishing to be disappointed in love. But more seriously, and more to the point even, this notion of strengthening objectivity is very suggestive in the way it makes plainer than ever that we do not have to oppose love and conviction and political soundness to ‘dispassionate’ ‘objective’ inquiry. The best way to do science, Harding argues, is to acknowledge that one always does it with conviction -- and to press for an acknowledgement and investigation of those convictions, and to press moreover for people to have the right convictions. (This is why we many of us don’t accept the ‘cold, hard-headedly impartial science’ of the Nazis as science at all, for example.)

Thus Harding is, while flirting with Post-Modernism, also updating an Ancient thought -- that there should be at the very least no contradiction between rationality and humanity, between knowledge and emotion, and so on. The marvellous Enlightenment concept of objectivity can be turned then into something that works for people, including the oppressed.

And if in love we can be strongly rational, strongly objective then... The lover need not think of her love as blinding her, but instead as potentially revealing the true nature of things to her. If she investigates and pursues her convictions and committment with conviction and committment, she may be being more sensible and more objective -- actively objective qua the relevant field of inquiry (i.e. What do I want? What does the other want? Who and what can we know? What will our future be like? And so on) -- more than the detached sceptic who distances herself from her own feelings of love in order to observe and investigate them, and thus self-defeatingly dictates the results of her inquiries ahead of time. For if you pretend to examine a love dispassionately and externally, you have already decided that it is not really love.

After trawling (if mostly fairly briefly!) through much of the last hundred years or so, including importantly the post-Positivist -- and then post-Kuhnian -- landscape of the philosophy of science, the parallelisms and even identities that we have by now identified between that philosophy on the one hand and what is true to say vis-a-vis an ars erotica on the other might seem quite extravagantly close and many. But -- of course -- one of the points of this essay, of its hopefully-humorous turnings of our thoughts, has been that the consideration of the rationality and ontology of amorousness -- of love -- analogously to that of science might actually not be that peculiar and merely amusing an exercise after all: because, as parenthetically hinted at the outset, the philosophy of science has already, in and of itself, and of necessity, attended to elements within the pursuit of science that reek of love. For example: one’s will (better, right) to believe, or one’s leap of faith, in (say) backing and throwing oneself into a research programme, is surely modelled more on love than on anything else. The quasi-Pascalian risk one takes in opening oneself up to another person and believing in them, one might venture, may well have been a prototype of the risk taken by any scientist who has ever ventured to be more than a ‘pure sceptical observer’ -- i.e., by any scientist. Any scientist who has a passion ... ‘for the truth’ -- and who else could be a scientist?

Could there have been Greek science, without Greek love, we might ask? Did Shakespeare (and even the troubadours) perhaps lay the groundwork for ‘the scientific revolution’?

Such questions seem, and probably are, somewhat absurd. Especially the latter question, for example; because, as Eco-Feminist Theory (of Science) has taught us, the mechanisation of nature which philosophically dominated much of the groundwork of the scientific revolution was surely very much the opposite of love. Perhaps at best only erotic love considered as Feminist philosophy of science will get us anywhere...

And yet, and yet ... the flipside, as we can now perhaps increasingly see, of the devastating critique by Radical Feminism, and by the likes recently of Carolyn Merchant, of the necrophilic mechanical mind-set of much of Modern techno-Science, especially perhaps in its Baconian roots, is that, as the likes of Evelyn Fox Keller have intimated, part of scientists’ defensive reaction-formation against the claims of love, of the Earth, of pain, of women, has always been so hard and unyielding, so desperate, because of the real danger that people would understand what any scientist inevitably is, however much his ideology may hide it: namely, a lover, of the truth. And more, perhaps, of his/her own paradigm, or research-programme, or theory, or field, or iconoclastic insights, or what-have-you. However deformed a scientist’s will to love is by reification of its object -- or even more perhaps by his or her own fear of that love -- the love(s) in question remain. That is to say: apologists for science-as-objective, as world-raping, etc., have perhaps always pushed their message so urgently and ruthlessly, and without much care for truth or consequences, because they have had to overcome among other things the knowledge, the self-knowledge, of the love built and active within them. Love of truth and wisdom. Love of those who they hope will benefit from the application of their research. Love as a side constraint. And above all, perhaps, love of their research, love of the (potential) contribution they are making, love as process.

All of these are phenomena which are seen in an apogee in the Modern West in partnerships built in part around erotic love. Love of the other, for their own sake, for the purity and wisdom that it brings and is. Love for the sake of its broader consequences also. And above all, perhaps, love of the common project one is building with and through one’s love -- love as togertheness, and individuation, and process.

Let us then say it plainly: What better models are available to us of the kind of phenomena of which (say) Kuhn speaks than models drawn from our knowledge of love? The scales which fell from the eyes of a Lavosier or a Newton, living in a different world, incommensurability; these poetic concepts, this new vocabulary, is the language of love (transfigured). Julian Barnes has written it, almost as if he had read the plain prose of an on-target philosopher like Harding and turned a wonderful novelist’s eye upon it:

This is difficult territory. We must be precise, and we mustn’t become sentimental... So where do we start? Love may or may not produce happiness; whether or not it does in the end, its primary effect is to energize. Have you ever talked so well, needed less sleep, returned to sex so eagerly, as when you were first in love? The anaemic begin to glow, while the normally healthy become intolerable. Next, it gives spine-stretching confidence. You feel you are standing up straight for the first time in your life; you can do anything while this feeling lasts, you can take on the world... . Then again, it gives clarity of vision: it’s a windscreen wiper across the eyeball. Have you ever seen things so clearly as when you were first in love?

We know the world of which Kuhn speaks, the world of seeing as into new worlds, the world of scientists and their (our) ilk non-rationally finding themselves throwing themselves occasionally into new worlds, out of the useful banality of most existence; because we know what love is.

Sure, reading Kuhn et al can possibly help us understand love a little better; but perhaps mostly because we can’t understand Kuhn properly in the first place unless we have both some understanding of the traditional ideology of love and some experience of the reality of love which it partially constitutes and (more usually?) tends to occlude.

To sum up. Love is like science -- once we see clearly how science is. (My picture has not really been a normative one -- I am not in the business of telling scientists how to manage their affairs better, but more modestly of doubting certain apologias for and theoretical accounts of those affairs.)

What has emerged, however, is that it is also true that science is like love. Again, my picture has been basically descriptive -- I am not in the business of telling people that they ought to reflect more or be more ‘rational’ in love. I have tried to look, briefly, at love as it is, and to highlight for example the risks of self-deception, of bad faith, consequent upon the extreme romanticist and irrationalist visions of love which have tended to pre-occupy us for many years now. I have tried to depict -- to leave? -- love as it is. It is thus, arguably, that philosophy, loving wisdom, can and should be.

But then, if we see clearly how love is, and see science’s likeness to it and dependence on it, we have in a way come more than full circle. And so perhaps I ought to have entitled this paper -- or maybe another, more important paper -- rather differently. To roughly reverse the title I began with, in fact, try: