Keywords

1 Introduction: You’d be Prettier if you Smiled More

This essay seeks to provide a limited historical and theoretical framework of the nature of the kind of love that has in the past (and presently) been considered “Bad Love.”Footnote 1 While this essay is centered on the Western canon of philosophical thought, it is indeed transcultural—this chapter examines the transformation of loves in the Ancient Greek philosophical thought of Plato to the Late Antique Christian Philosophy of the North African Roman theologian St. Augustine of Hippo. In a way this essay is also transcultural in that it seeks to draw a line between modern practices and understandings of Bad Love to those of the Ancient and Late Antique world. This Introduction will provide a short overview of the philosophical methodology of the essay, the concept of Bad Love in modern culture today, and finally, the structure of this essay.

This essay is a contribution to the Philosophy of Love, which is an umbrella term for the field of philosophy which seeks to understand the nature of love.Footnote 2 Discipline of philosophy that is concerned with the history, ethics, and nature of love in its many forms. This category of philosophy attracts scholars with diverse methodological backgrounds. The methodology of this essay is grounded in feminist theory, the history of emotions, and moral psychology.Footnote 3 The essay focuses in on certain themes in the works of Plato and Augustine regarding Bad Love and explores them as such: this kind of focused analysis can be found in the works of philosophers and theologians such as Miles (for example, 2005 and 2006), Webb (2013), and Aumiller (2019).

Defining the true nature and definition of love actually is outside of the purview of this essay. Instead, this essay seeks to explore but one facet in the nature of love (Bad Love), its history and its present. Modern popular theories of emotion distinguish between loves: there is true love and puppy love, parental love and child love, friendly, Platonic love, the love for and of our pets, the love for and of non-human others. What is often considered a different category all together are states like obsession, lust, the desire for domination, the laser focus of an abuser on their victim.

This last series of emotional states are set over and against love: they are false loves, they masquerade as the real thing but deep down have their origin in violence and hatred, misogyny and rage. These states provoke a common response in champions of love: they are not real love. But what if these vicious states are kinds of love? What if they come from the same place from whence the purest of loves springs? What if they are, in fact, forms of Bad Love?

Bad Love abounds in modern romances. An example of this can be found in the modern practice of negging, in which a man insults a woman in a particular way in order to lower her self-esteem enough for him to trick her into sex. There are many popular dating-advice articles (for example, Helm, 2017; Howard, 2017; Pugachevsky, 2019; Woolf, 2012) that define and decry this act. Pugachevsky (2019), a writer for Cosmopolitan Magazine, defines negging as

… when a person who is objectively less of a catch than you finds ways to manipulate you into feeling bad about yourself so that you’ll want to impress them (i.e., sleep with them).

What may come as not much of a surprise is that this modern practice of negging is not new. In Plato’s dialogue on love, Phaedrus (1997), the titular character shares a speech given to him by Lysias, a rhetorician who sought to persuade the young Phaedrus into to having sex with older men who did not love him. The Phaedrus itself explores the nature of love, the soul, and rhetoric, but what is most relevant to this essay is the shrewdness of Socrates, who immediately cuts through the false narrative Lysias has provided the handsome Phaedrus: of course Lysias desired Phaedrus, he was merely lying in order to achieve his goals. Phaedrus was being tricked into sex through the act of negging—Lysias lies Phaedrus about his actual love for him at the same time that he gives back-handed complements on Phaedrus’ intellect.

Socrates is intimately familiar with the technique of negging for good reason: he practices it himself. In Plato’s Lysis (1997), a dialogue ostensibly about the nature of philia, friendship-love, Socrates explains how important it is not to sing the praises of potential lovers but to knock them down a peg or two in conversation, thus keeping young would-be-beloveds in their place as lesser intellectuals in order to leave them gasping for the wisdom within their older pedagogue.

Thus, two Platonic dialogues on love and friendship have a worm within their hearts: insult masquerading as friendship, lies masquerading as truths, bad lovers masquerading as friends. In the intervening 2500 years much has been written on the nature of desire and the nature of love, this chapter explores this sinister side of love.

There are two major sections of this essay: 2. “When Love Was Bad” and 3. “Bad Love, Revisited.” “When Love Was Bad,” provides a brief background on the philosophical history of “bad love.” Beginning with Reid’s (2019) conception of Platonic “bad love,” this section swiftly turns to Augustine’s analysis of love and emotion in Book 14 of The City of God (2003). Augustine, whose own definitions of love tend to be slippery, wrote in a time that love as a whole was considered to be “bad.” Augustine’s defense of love as fundamental for human emotion provides the groundwork for an understanding of Augustinian Bad Love.

The second major section, “Bad Love, Revisited,” synthesizes Augustine’s account of emotion with Susan Brison’s feminist philosophical account of trauma. Brison’s (2003) account of the splintering effect of trauma on the psyche provides a framework for better understanding the effect of Bad Love on human moral structures. This essay concludes with a reexamination of Platonic negging and Augustinian emotion, thus reaffirming the slipperiness of Bad Love, which defies categorization at the same time it invites an epistemological account of its nature. Ultimately, Augustine’s account of love as the foundation for all emotion is valuable for reimagining the nature of love in general and Bad Love in particular.

2 When Love Was Bad

As discussed above, the definition love is a difficult one to pin down—it is impossible to provide a detailed account of every aspect of love in the world or that which is found in the fourth century B.C.E. philosopher Plato or the fifth century CE philosopher theologian Augustine. Christian children hear that God is love, and that there should be a kind of “neighborly love” for friends. Most people love their families and friends. Readers with children may love them, too. The author of this essay has cats (and loves them, too).

What is love? Is it an emotion? A feeling? An affect (if we wish to separate these terms)? If love is an emotion is it a basic or a complex emotion? These questions and more are explored in the field of Philosophy of Love. The scope of this essay is more narrow.

In his chapter “Plato on Love and Sex,” Jeremy Reid (2019) provides an account of the representation of love given in Plato’s Laws as fundamental for understanding Plato’s overall account of love. He emphasizes the duality that is loving for Plato: there is “bad love” and “good love.” As Reid shows in his interesting essay, the good kind of love is one-sided and calm, not dark and stormy. He writes,

The bad kind of love involves a desire primarily directed at the beloved’s body, and (though explained with ancient reticence) aims at gaining sexual pleasure from him.

He claims that this bad kind of love involves the love of a particular beloved’s and is focused on sexual gratification. Thus, on Reid’s view, for Plato bad love is bodily, earthly, and aims only at what one can gain from the object. Reid (and Plato) contrast this bad love with good love, which is,

directed at the beloved’s soul… the lover is happy merely to look upon the beloved (Reid, 2019, 106).

This account of disinterested love focused on the goodness and essence (i.e. soul) of the beloved maps onto modern perceptions of “true love” as a state of disinterestedness. The bad lover, however, only wants things from their beloved, such as sexual or personal gratification.

The Bad Love that is the focus of this chapter is not the bad love Reid attributes to Plato. There was a time long ago that all loves were considered bad by certain groups. It is this during this time that Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) discussed the nature of human love in his hugely important theological text, The City of God. In Augustine’s time there was a desire to not only to distinguish between good love and bad love, but between love itself (as bad) and other, calmer mental states.

The confusion caused by the nature of something so fundamental to human life as love is, of course, not lost on Augustine. The difficulty of pinning down the nature of love is seen in Augustine’s terminology for love in its many forms amor/amare, caritas/dilectio/diligere, libido, appetitus, concupiscentia, cupiditas/cupere, etc. Augustine does not maintain a strict vocabulary in discussing things like love and God and body and soul—his language evolves over time and, as a rhetorician, he is always utilizing words that are the best for his audience.

In “Cupiditas and Caritas: The Early Augustine on Love and Fulfillment,” William Babcock (1993) distinguishes between two kinds of love in Augustine: “true object” and “false object” loves—this dichotomy, as we have seen, is present in other philosophical engagements with love. The two categories Babcock (1993) delineates are, ultimately, caritas and cupiditas, between “true love” and desire. It is tempting to place amore and caritas over and against libido, appetitus, concupiscentia, and cupiditas. However, this dualism implies that caritas and cupiditas are something other than love (amore).

This duality is certainly at play in the subject of this chapter: obsessive states are often described as not-love. The desire to control, to dominate is said to be the motivating factor of abusers. Reid’s Platonic “good love” and “bad love” seem to map onto what Augustine’s account of love is—the true form of love and its negation.

Augustine’s accounting of love is much more complex than a simple dichotomy, however. The next two subsections—“The Love that is Emotion” and “When the Love is Bad: The Love that is Concupiscent Desire”—both examine Augustine’s understanding of the relationship between (bad) love and emotion. These sections will explore Augustine’s texts directly in order to provide an account of the Bad Love that this essay seeks to qualify.

2.1 The Love that Is Emotion

Many theories within the philosophy of love claim that love is a kind of emotion. However, the concept of love precedes that of emotion. In her essay “Emotion in Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas: A Way Forward for the Im/passibility Debate?”, Anastasia Scrutton (2005) writes,

In fact, the concept of the emotions is exclusive to the modern era. The term did not crop up in English until the mid-sixteenth century, when it was used to denote a public disturbance, and was not given its current meaning until the early nineteenth century.

Furthermore, no exact translation or equivalent is found in Latin or any of the ancient languages. In contrast to the preference of the modern world for a single overarching category, the ancients and mediaeval worlds had a diversity of descriptions of human experiences. Passiones, motus, motus animae, passions animae, affectus, affectiones, libidines, perturbations and libido are all Latin terms now generally translated ‘emotions’ or ‘feelings’—translations which can negate the original implications of each term. (Scrutton, 2005, 170)

Emotions and feelings, on Scrutton’s account, are represented by a plethora of words in Latin, none of which convey what modern accounts of emotion seek to convey. However, Augustine’s account of the nature of feelings (what can generally be described as emotions), is important for moving forward in the philosophy of love and emotions.Footnote 4 Love, for Augustine, is not an emotion at all, and neither is it a proto-emotion.

In Book 14, Chap. 7 of City of God, Augustine is speaking against stoics and skeptics who deny the validity of love, emotion, and feeling.Footnote 5 He seeks to defend his claims about what is and is not love in terms of Christian identity with Scripture.

In Augustine’s interpretation of John 21, 15–19,Footnote 6 he emphasizes that Christ actually asks “Diligis me?” twice and “Amas me?” once. Augustine writes,

The reason why I thought I should mention this is that quite a number of people imagine that fondness (dilectionem) and charity (caritatem) are something different from love (amorem). They say, in fact, that ‘fondness’ is to be taken in a good sense, ‘love’ in a bad sense. […] My task, however, was to make the point that the Scriptures of our religion, whose authority we rank above all other writings, do not distinguish between ‘love’ and ‘fondness’ or ‘charity.’ For I have shown that ‘love’ is also used in a good sense. (Augustine, 2003, XIV.7, 557, emphasis mine)

Here the difficulties of understanding love in Augustine become clear. Augustine is working towards proving the importance of many forms of love by founding love, amore, in Scripture. That is, in this Scripture he finds more than merely fondness (diletionem) or charity (caritas). He folds together many forms of love as interchangeable states that are both distinct and the same.

The “good sense” and “bad sense” dichotomy in the passage above comes up again in terms of the object of love and the objects of desire in relationship to the emotions later in this chapter and in the overall text. Augustine immediately follows the above discussion of the presence of love in the Scriptures by defining the relationship between the human will and the objects of its love:

And so a rightly directed will (recta uoluntas) is love in a good sense (bonus amor) and a perverted will (uoluntas peruersa) is love in a bad sense (malus amor). Therefore a love which strains after the possession of the loved object is desire (cupiditas); and the love which possesses and enjoys that object is joy (laetitia). The love that shuns what opposes it is fear, while the love that feels that opposition when it happens is grief. Consequently, these feelings are bad, if the love is bad, and good if the love is good. (Augustine, 2003, XIV.7, 557)

In this passage we are given Augustine’s account of human emotion: all emotions are kinds of love (amor) that are either good (bonus) or bad (malus). The goodness or badness of any given emotion has to do with the will with which one loves—recta or peruersa.

In this list it would seem that Augustine offers contrasts, rightly directed will vs. perverted will, good love vs. bad love, and desire verses joy. However, this reading of Augustine’s use of parallelism neglects the final sentence: “these feelings are bad, if the love is bad, and good if the love is good.” Desire, joy, fear, and grief are all good “feelings” when the love that grounds them is good.

One can see this in action through an example: grieving over the ending of a romantic relationship for a short time can be good. Caused by a love that wants what it can no longer have, grief gives comfort to the scorned. However, that grief ought to be rightly willed—a grief over a future that will not occur and a past that is no longer grounded in the present. If the grief is grounded in a perverted will, it hurts the individual feeling that feeling: the scorned party, unable to move forward, breaks the windows of her lover’s truck, goes to his work to confront him in public, etc.

This bad love is not related to the object of that love, but in the will of the person possessing that love. It is necessary to determine what, exactly, love is doing here in the equation. Thus, the next section, “When the Love is Bad: The Love that is Concupiscent Desire,” explores the nature of sexual desire and its relationship to both the emotions and bodily loves.

2.2 When the Love Is Bad: The Love that Is Concupiscent Desire

As shown above, a distinctive facet of Augustine’s conception of emotion as love is the fact that all emotions involve a love that is oriented towards an object. Desire (cupiditas) has at its heart the inability to possesses its object—when we possess and object we no longer desire it, when we have it we now are in a state of joy. Both states, whether possessing or not-possessing their objects, are forms of love. This section examines the nature of concupiscentia and whether it is a candidate for an understanding of the account of Bad Love that was promised in the beginning of this essay.

Concupiscentia is a word with cupid at its heart, it is considered to be the kind of desire that uncontrolled lust. It is a bad love, some say, and Augustine himself uses the term often interchangeably with cupiditas. Concupiscentia is a love that is not to be desired as it is unrestrained desire.

Many scholars of Augustine on love read concupiscentia as directly related to sexual desire. This is understandable, considering how Augustine discusses “dread lust” in Chaps. 16 and 18 of the fourteenth book of City of God. In these chapters Augustine takes a break in his discussion of the Edenic Fall to discuss sexual desire:

We see then that there are lusts (libidines) for many things, and yet when lust is mentioned without the specification of its object the only thing that normally occurs to the mind is the lust that excites the indecent parts of the body (obscenae partes corporis excitantur). This lust assumes power not only over the whole body, and not only from the outside, but also internally; it disturbs the whole man, when the mental emotion combines and mingles with the physical craving, resulting in a pleasure surpassing all physical delights. So intense is the pleasure that when it reaches its climax there is almost total extinction of mental alertness; the intellectual sentries, as it were, are overwhelmed. […] Sometimes the [sexual] impulse is an unwanted intruder, sometimes it abandons the eager lover, and desire (concupiscentia) cools off in the body while it is at boiling heat in the mind. Thus strangely does lust refuse to be a servant not only to the will to beget but even to the lust for lascivious indulgence; and although on the whole it is totally opposed to the mind’s control, it is quite often divided against itself. It arouses the mind, but does not follow its own lead by arousing the body.” (Augustine, 2003, XIV.16, 577)

Here it seems clear that, for Augustine, lust and concupiscence are neither emotions nor bodily—they are related to the will but are not equal to it.

In general, lust excites the “indecent parts of the body” at some moments and at others, while ravaging the mind, refuses to move those same indecent parts. This passage brings to mind the Porter scene in Act II Scene III of Macbeth:

Porter (to MacDuff): Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep and urine. Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes the desire, but it takes away the performance; therefore, much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery: it makes him, and it mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to, and not stand to; in conclusion, equivocates him in a sleep, and, giving him the lie, leaves him. (Shakespeare, 1998, II.iii.5–8, pp. 131–132)

Lust takes over resonates in both flesh and mind in ways that do not necessarily lead to the sex that is desired. These passages, however, concern themselves with sexuality after the Fall—that is, they concern themselves with punishment for the Fall. For Augustine, it is not possible to love rightly when one is overwhelmed with a lust that seeks to control others, a lust that cannot even be trusted to arise when one wishes.

According to Augustine, we human beings associate desire with the body because that is the most universally present reminder of what little control we have over our own desires and our own selves. Thus this kind of love is a candidate for the Bad Love at the heart of the viciousness we humans can do to each other. However, we know from other texts of Augustine that concupiscentia is also associated with any kind of desire whose object one does not yet possess. Concupiscentia thus moves beyond mere love of sexual gratification to the kind of love one has have for things like cats, lovers, friends, blood-sport, and even the kind of love parents have for their children, children for their parents, etc. In this way, concupiscentia becomes the primary mode that human beings experience and express amor.

The “bad love” Augustine claims to be the origin for bad emotions is not concupiscentia—the desire for an object outside of oneself is not bad in itself. All love pulls itself out of the inner space of the heart/soul and stretches outwards into the world. Caritas also stretches out and within that inner cubiculum of the heart.Footnote 7 The previous section (with its two parts) focused on the account of emotion and concupiscent desire given in Augustine’s text. It has been shown that emotion, for Augustine, is a kind of love, and whether the emotion is good or bad depends on the object of that love. Moreover, the category of desire (as concupiscentia) has been shown to be more expansive that of just desire for sexual pleasure. The next section explores the nature of concupiscent love in relationship with the kinds of trauma it can lead to.

3 Bad Love, Revisited

One’s experience of the world as it is not one that can be radically intrapersonal, though the effect of the world on one’s ability to experience the world is very real and important. In Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Susan Brison (2003) recounts in harrowing detail the effects of the brutal, life-halting rape she suffered. She writes,

At the time I did not yet know how trauma not only haunts the conscious and unconscious mind, but also remains in the body, in each of the senses, ready to resurface whenever something triggers a reliving of the traumatic event. I didn’t know that the worst—the unimaginably painful aftermath of violence—was yet to come. (Brison, 2003, x)

In the aftermath of experiences of great trauma there are scars on the psyche that present themselves physically. Brison’s trauma caused her to reknit herself, to make herself again, not the same but reborn.

After a traumatic experience the victim is often left with the pain of others waiting for them to “get better”—to become themselves again. Under extreme trauma, according to Brison, there is no going back. One’s feelings and emotions, too, are splintered and left to re-heal. This splintered affect can be seen in Augustine’s writings of the human Fall (after Adam and Eve taste of the forbidden fruit and are both made to see the difference between good and evil as well as to leave paradise) as well as his discussions of what it is to be human—I wonder how many sins can be attributed to Bad Love—the kind of love, perhaps, that seeks control rather than union.

For Augustine, concupiscentia is natural to the human person; it existed in the Garden of Eden through to today, and is resurrected in the world that is to come. Whenever Augustine discusses the deep mythology of the Christian faith he is not speaking in absolutes—he is seeking to expand upon what he takes to be a central component of human life—love is embodied and extends to fill everything up from within, spilling out into the world.Footnote 8 But love is not necessarily stable and often troublesome—we often love things we shouldn’t, and even occasionally identify with those who hurt us rather than ourselves. Love complicates things, much more so when love as a concept is bracketed and shuffled off as not something to be discussed right now.

Love permeates human life, and its presence and lack has a great impact on not just one’s mood but one’s way of processing the world. Concupiscentia is a bodily kind of love—it is the love for worldly things and people; it is a love that is associated with physical feeling, with quivering movements and yearning leaning toward despair. But caritas too has these moments. Augustine’s account of caritas—the human love of God—abounds with libidinal imagery. Caritas is bodily as it is extended, as is concupiscentia. There is perhaps no human love that is not bodied. And yet there are aspects of love that are necessarily outward reaching and seemingly unembodied: love is a pulling and striving toward another outside of oneself.

For Augustine, the Fall of Adam and Eve led to a splintered affect in all humans, a concupiscentia that has come unstuck from its place in the hierarchy in the human soul and abandoned to the whims and caprices of the world. Any child of Adam is necessarily born with such a splintered affect, and with each new trauma comes another cascade of shards, moving into many different kinds of directions. And yet, for all its weakness, the human body is needed for sensing beatitude, but also for being beautiful in its right.

Returning to Chap. 7 of Book 14, Augustine unpacks his account of love and emotion in terms of scripture in a way that provides a deeper understanding of what it means to will and to love:

The Apostle ‘desires (Concupiscit) to depart and to be with Christ” (Phil 1, 23); and, ‘My soul has desired (Concupiuit) to long (desiderare) for your judgments’ (Ps. 119, 20), or (to put it more appropriately), ‘My soul has longed to desire your judgments’; and, ‘The desire (concupiscentia) for wisdom leads to sovereignty’ (Wisd. 6, 20). All the same, it is the established usage that when we use ‘desire’ (cupiditas or concupiscentia) without specifying its object it can only be understood in a bad sense. (Augustine, 2003, XIV.7, 558)Footnote 9

Scripture is replete with right-willed concupiscentia-desire. Augustine clarifies again that it is the object of the desire (what is willed for) that makes the desire either good or bad. “In a bad sense” is repeated several times in Book 14, Chap. 7 of The City of God (I have included several of the uses of the phrase in this essay). For Augustine, it is only when there is not a clear object of concupiscent desire is the term meant “in a bad sense” in Scripture. It is object-less desire-love that leads to Bad Love: it is the kind of love which overreaches its object.

In this chapter, Augustine gives humanity three bodies: one mythic and natural, one temporal and wild, and one spiritual. He goes to great lengths to insist that the first body—that of Adam and Eve—naturally had emotions, desire, and the capacity for sexuality. He then claims that the mode by which emotions are expressed in both this world and the next to be loving, as we saw earlier in Chap. 7, love is the extension by which one wills into the world and is affected by the world. And yet Augustine seems to claim in Chap. 9 that emotions (apart from joy) do not belong in the ecstatic state of things (Augustine, 2003, XIV.9, 564). And so what can be thought of this seeming contradiction?

In the Chap. 14, Book 9 of the City of God, after having discussed the nature of love, the naturalness of love, the relationship between love, will, and emotions, Augustine turns to apatheia, the state of being so longed for by stoics and other philosophers. Apatheia is to be unmoved by pathos (passio), to be unmoved by the world or by one’s own emotions and, indeed, to kill one’s emotions and replace them with passionless, isolated reason.

Apatheia is the parent of the motherless nous that has guided Western Philosophy’s desire for reason. Augustine is not a fan of apatheia:

Moreover, if apatheia is the name of the state in which the mind cannot be touched by any emotion (affectus) whatsoever, who would not judge this insensitivity (stuporem) to be the worst of all moral defects? There is therefore nothing absurd in the assertion that the final complete happiness will be exempt from the spasms of fear and from any kind of grief; but only a man utterly cut off from truth would say that love (amorem) and gladness (gaudiumque) will have no place there. (Augustine, 2003, XIV.9.565)

Henry Bettenson, the English translator of this text, charitably translates “stuporem” as “insensitivity”—the word connotes in Latin what it sounds like in English—stupidity, stupefaction, numbness. Those who think that the desirable state of being to be emotionless (both internally and externally) are themselves in a stupor, on Augustine’s view. In this way Augustine provides a kind of philosophical background to Susan Bordo’s (1987, 2004) (among many other feminist thinkers) insights into the falseness of “objectivity” in philosophy and science.Footnote 10

Given my reading of Book 14 of the City of God, Augustine does not seek a beatitude (that is, heaven) that is unbodied or unloving or emotionless. Because there is joy in the next world, there could, too, be some kind of heavenly concupiscentia; this heavenly concupiscentia is necessary for there to be relation with other humans in beatitude. Again, Augustine does not make clear that cupiditas/concupiscentia involves a bad love. The feelings associated with it are bad only when the love is bad, and the love is bad only when its object is unfixed.

To return to the “negging” example given in the Introduction: the seducer lies to his victim in order to have sex with her (or, perhaps, to punish all women), but the seducer does not want sex with her, or, indeed, any specific woman at all. The seducer wants to seduce any woman. Thus the seducer’s desire is necessarily one that overreaches any one object.

This section has expanded on Augustine’s account of concupiscentia in order to arrive at an understanding of what, for him, is Bad Love. For Augustine being human is a murky business—pulled by a desire/love that is constantly shattered and rejoined the goal for some may be the cessation of all desire/love. But for Augustine all love is rooted in desire, and all desire is rooted in love. These are facets of the same stone, and can in theory be viewed separable but are in fact inseparable.

4 Conclusion: But, Babe, I Love You

This chapter must conclude with an affirmation of the elusiveness of the category “Bad Love.” The kinds of bad love that are delineated in the introduction of this chapter do not map onto Augustine’s account of concupiscentia at all. This is due to the fact that the nature of love is murky itself, and it is only when the love is bad that the feeling is bad, and, by extension, it is when the will that is doing the loving is perverse that the love that results is manipulative, controlling, hurtful.

Denying that those that use love as a weapon actually, truly love covers over one epistemological problem with another: love becomes more and more narrowed when its bad persona is denied. Augustine’s account of love on the one hand is closer to a common-place understanding of what love is: love is less and emotion than it is a reframing of one’s existence towards an unstable other (and we are all unstable objects of love). On the other hand, it opens an epistemological space for an understanding of the category of Bad Love as Love in the Bad Sense.

I opened this chapter with a reference to the negging found in the Speech of Lysias in Plato’s Phaedrus. Augustine has choice words to say about Plato’s conception of the human person, and spends some time in Book 14 mocking the Phaedrus for its absurdity. On Augustine’s view, the Platonic theory of body/soul makes flesh responsible for moral failings in a way that is illogical (Augustine, 2003, XIV.5, 554). He describes Plato’s horses and their status as the cause for the re-embodiment of souls: the horse representing dread lust throws the triune soul out of joint with itself: unable to maintain its life in the ideal realm, the soul falls back into any body that happens to be ready. Thus lust, on Plato’s account, is already in the soul and not in the body. Augustine writes,

Thus on their own confession, it is not only from the influence of the flesh that the soul experiences desire and fear, joy and distress; it can also be disturbed by those emotions from a source within itself (Augustine, 2003, XIV.5, 555).

The severance of passionless reason from reasonless emotion is made circumspect in Plato’s Phaedrus. In the Phaedrus, Socrates and his friend and student Phaedrus discuss a written speech of the orator Lysias. In this speech, Lysias argues that it is better for the young man to have sex with an older man who does not really love him than with one who does. Socrates makes many objections to this speech, not least of which is that Lysias is lying. Socrates alleges that there is eros secretly hidden in the motivation of the speaker: Lysias actually desires the boy he claims to not desire. The claim of Lysias, that it is preferable to sleep with a man who does not love you rather than one who does, is the claimed avowal of a certain kind of reason over passion, logos over eros.

This division is necessarily a false one: we are never really separate from our emotions when we reason. The Phaedrus offers an interpretation of reason that is not without love and puts to the test the myth of passionless logic. It is a lie people tell themselves when they claim to be making rational choices when in fact they are choosing what kind of desire to live with.

Augustine’s exploration into the relationship between love, desire, and emotion is one that has been greatly influential to Western thought on love. Augustine’s actual account of the emotions as kinds of loving, and Bad Love as objectless loving is one that is worth revisiting in modern scholarship on the philosophy of love as well as the psychology of those whose love seeks to dominate, such as emotional abusers.