A Vindication of Love:
Reclaiming Romance for
the Twenty-First Century
By Cristina Nehring
(Harper, 328 pp., $24.99)
Women today are too risk-averse in love, charges Cristina Nehring. We “settle,” and seek comfort rather than passion. In flight from pain, we end up too often with mediocre and cramped relationships. Obsessed with control, we lack “the generous fault to put oneself entirely in another’s hands and thus be at his mercy.” We employ a whole battery of devices to lessen our exposure to experience, to distance ourselves from real vulnerability: we regard our passions with ironic distance; we convert sex into a commodity; we glorify momentary pleasure rather than lasting emotion.
In the process, Nehring continues, women are losing out on one of life’s great goods. For love is not just wonderful in itself, it is also a source of energy for the rest of life’s activities--particularly, perhaps, for artistic and intellectual creativity. And it is a source of insight, leading us to see ourselves and others with more generous and accurate eyes. (Here Nehring draws persuasively on Plato’s Phaedrus.) In sum, love makes the entire person come alive--but only if it is pursued with sufficient openness and daring that it brings with it a constant danger of pain and loss.
So far, so good. Nehring certainly raises an important issue--although it is not only with respect to love, and not only yesterday and today, that people have preferred to live in an excess of caution. Most people in most times and places have been averse to risk, avoiding deep commitments of all sorts--to work, to justice, to a cause, to a country--
because they can see that through such commitments they would risk failure on a large scale. Most people enjoy contemplating the sufferings of tragic heroes, but they do not wish to be called upon for heroism themselves. Not caring deeply; looking at everything with irony, as a mere spectacle; and pursuing superficial pleasures: these are clever ways of evading or thwarting tragedy--in love, but also in every department of life. The smallness of aspiration against which Nietzsche inveighed in his portrait of “the last man” is not, as he suggested, a recent creation of bourgeois European Christianity. It is a pervasive inclination of ordinary human life.
But it is certainly possible that in America in our own era we are seeing a rising tide of risk aversion. If I compare my students today with my student contemporaries of the 1960s and 1970s, they certainly do seem to be more cautious and more calculating--about career choice, political engagement, and aspiration generally. They make prudent life plans, and they are unembarrassed by all their prudence. It would not surprise me if attitudes to romantic love have become similarly cautious and calculating, and perhaps also similarly ironic and detached. How could they not, if people are determined not to take large risks in any precinct of life?
Nehring provides no systematic evidence for the claim that attitudes to love have changed. She ignores a huge stretch of popular culture when she says that we badly need some books that make passionate romance sexy for women. Can it be that she has never encountered romance novels? Does she not go to the movies? Still, she is on solid ground when she contends that many people miss a lot in life, including a deeper understanding of self and other, because they are determined not to fail and not to suffer--because they hold the conviction that it is not better to have loved and lost. If you are a person globally averse to risk, then you will circumspectly avoid profound personal love, because its riskiness is obvious.
Nehring seeks to “reinvent” romantic love for our time, and to accomplish this by telling great love stories from literature and history, trying to get us to see how appealing they are in their proud openness to risk and in the magnitude of loss to which they make themselves vulnerable. Abelard and Heloise, Antony and Cleopatra, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, Margaret Fuller and Count Giovanni Ossoli, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera--they are all fun to read about, and they do remind us of the joyousness and the wisdom that can come from life lived on a grand scale, without crippling self-protectiveness. (Although most of Nehring’s key examples are heterosexual, she expresses sympathy with same-sex lovers too, and evidently thinks that the same analysis applies to their choices.) Nehring rarely mentions the fact that some of these examples are fictional and some real, but blurring that line does not cause confusion, because her strategy is to show the lasting appeal of these stories for women today, as models and possibilities.
Unfortunately--since there is a good idea here--Nehring does not have terribly good taste about what is sexy in literary love. She adores the large melodramatic gesture, but does not seem drawn to subtlety, playfulness, or finesse. There is “hardly a sexier moment in the history of opera,” she pronounces, than the scene in Carmen in which Carmen convinces Don José to release her. Well, all right, the music is first-rate, but the view of love on offer is so adolescent that even Nietzsche--famous for his silly views about women and love--went for it. The simple man brought low by the wiles of a heartless seductress: this is a banal male fantasy, and it has very little to do with anything like love.
One suspects that Nehring would be utterly bored by the passages in opera--which is indeed a vast literature about love--that explore love and sexuality in a more subtle and, I think, more genuinely erotic manner: the playful, tender seduction duet “Il cuore vi dono” in Così Fan Tutte, which surely depicts risk in its own way, by showing how one can search for one’s own heart and then discover that it is beating over there, in someone else’s body; or the ecstatic final duet “Pur ti miro, pur ti godo” in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, which shows why one would want to take a risk in the first place--so as to attain a rapturous focus on the person one loves. Notice that in both lyrics the “you,” not the “I,” is paramount: these lovers are savoring one another, not their own interesting mental states.
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COMMENTS (3)
I admire Nussbaum's thoughtfulness enormously, but her review is full of over-arrogated and self authoritized empirical claims about human beings; this is rife in the humanities. She seems to think that one can reason or theorize or intuit one's way to psychological truth about actual human beings. If we want to know whether "difference" however defined, leads to greater erotic passion than "similarity," we have to study actual human beings. People in the humanities, in matters of psychology, readily throw out simple epistemological sanity. If we want to know if professional risk aversion motivates or is correlated with romantic risk aversion under given circumstances, we have to do research ... view full comment
I admire Nussbaum's thoughtfulness enormously, but her review is full of over-arrogated and self authoritized empirical claims about human beings; this is rife in the humanities. She seems to think that one can reason or theorize or intuit one's way to psychological truth about actual human beings. If we want to know whether "difference" however defined, leads to greater erotic passion than "similarity," we have to study actual human beings. People in the humanities, in matters of psychology, readily throw out simple epistemological sanity. If we want to know if professional risk aversion motivates or is correlated with romantic risk aversion under given circumstances, we have to do research, establish evidence and then begin theorizing. We have to look and see. Ditto if we want to know whether transgressive love is deeper and more "real" --something Thomas Mann intuited about gay sexual desire.
Nussbaum reflects professional, role-based narcissism in her implicit epistemology, which results from the division of labor in academia and the consequent anti-intellectualism. To wit, if "insight" "intuition" "perception" is what you have to address empirical psychological questions, people in the humanities rely on that, instead of saying they don't know. We've just come out of 100 years of pscyhoanalytically based folly in treating mental illness...
Timothy Beneke
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I have not read Christine Nehring’s A Vindication Of Love and I barely know who she is. But I did read Martha Nussbaum’s review of Nehring’s book; and I do know something about Nussbaum.
For Nussbaum an exemplary life is one of risk, challenge, profundity, seriousness and encountering big things: “The smallness of aspiration against which Nietzsche inveighed in his portrait of “the last man” is not, as he suggested, a recent creation of bourgeois European Christianity. It is a pervasive inclination of ordinary human life.” And: “The wise thesis is that one should be willing to incur risk for the sake of a deep and valuable love…”; “given that people tend to be self-insul ... view full comment
I have not read Christine Nehring’s A Vindication Of Love and I barely know who she is. But I did read Martha Nussbaum’s review of Nehring’s book; and I do know something about Nussbaum.
For Nussbaum an exemplary life is one of risk, challenge, profundity, seriousness and encountering big things: “The smallness of aspiration against which Nietzsche inveighed in his portrait of “the last man” is not, as he suggested, a recent creation of bourgeois European Christianity. It is a pervasive inclination of ordinary human life.” And: “The wise thesis is that one should be willing to incur risk for the sake of a deep and valuable love…”; “given that people tend to be self-insulating and risk-averse, valuable love involves “conquest and self-conquest,” a struggle against one’s own selfish and self-protective propensities. In this sense, struggle does seem intrinsic to the valuable type of love.”
An anecdote may illustrate the problem I find with Nussbaum’s arguments. I had a friend of mine too many years ago—in 1969—guest teach my first year English class, the students of which I otherwise taught, graded and passed and failed when I was a graduate student in English literature. He had not long before been an Assistant Professor who had never finished his PhD. After a power shift in my university’s English department he was deemed part of the dead wood. He was denied tenure. He went through ample protest, grief, apathy, depression and finally emerged with a not so bad teaching job in a local junior college which he stayed at for the rest of his career. In the guest class, at a certain point he launched into a paroxysm of passionate advice for my freshmen students to take risks, court the possibility of failure, engage chaos if need be, rather than lemming like proceed through life with nothing ventured nothing gained.
I gave him a ride home after the class and at a certain point I asked him (told him really) whether it was presumptuous to so harangue my students when he did not know the first thing about any of them and when his own lived life contradicted all his advice. He had the same need for security and stability we all did. He was married and had to worry about paying a mortgage and such like—he had no kids—and to do that to bring home a pay cheque. I did not see him taking any risks, meeting great challenges, doing anything outside his day to day work remarkable for its seriousness and gravitas; nor did I see him engaging big things or courting either danger or chaos. I said, getting a head of steam going, that considering the example of his own life his advice was near a lie and that even if he exemplified his advice, dispensing it to impressionable first year students who never sought it was out of line, and, I thought, undeservedly self congratulatory.
I don’t like the notion of the last man though I think Nussbaum softens it almost to the point of platitude--reducing it from a specific social observation rooted in a specific time-- by saying, as if one upping Nietzsche, “…his portrait of “the last man” is not, as he suggested, a recent creation of bourgeois European Christianity. It is a pervasive inclination of ordinary human life.”
Ya’ think?
Really, you don’t need a PhD in philosophy from Harvard to know that “pervasive inclination”.
I note Nussbaum’s slicing of Nehring’s argument into two theses: the willingness to incur risk for the sake of a deep and valuable love; and the measure of love’s quality as the quantum of danger, risk and suffering we incur in its attainment. That second thesis is, as Nussbaum says, “adolescent and silly” for the reasons she points out and others--it's melodramatic, self absorbed, and an abstraction which fixes on a vulgarly romantic conception of love rather than the mature actuality of it as we experience it concretely in our lives.
But the first thesis, which Nussbaum calls "sensible and wise", is no bargain either though for different reasons. Who is Nussbaum (or Nehring for that matter) to be recommending to people that they take risks for great love? What does she know, like my advice dispensing rather hapless friend, about whom she is talking to? What body of evidence gives her advice any foundation? After all, she herself notes that “Nehring provides no systematic evidence for the claim that attitudes to love have changed”. And what is her own systematic evidence? It amounts to this:
“…But it is certainly possible that in America in our own era we are seeing a rising tide of risk aversion. If I compare my students today with my student contemporaries of the 1960s and 1970s, they certainly do seem to be more cautious and more calculating--about career choice, political engagement, and aspiration generally. They make prudent life plans, and they are unembarrassed by all their prudence. It would not surprise me if attitudes to romantic love have become similarly cautious and calculating, and perhaps also similarly ironic and detached. How could they not, if people are determined not to take large risks in any precinct of life?...”
This seems illogical to me. Let’s assume that students are more prudent and calculating now than they were in the sixties—a case I’d rather see made than asserted impressionistically (and note the hedging " ...it is certainly possible"). How does anything telling about their attitudes to romantic love necessarily follow? What, even in these impressionistic surmises, are we to gather about the attitudes of the more activist students of 30 and 40 years ago towards such love, of which I was one (save perhaps that we thought the whole notion of romantic love was a bourgeois con)?
These quarrels with Nussbaum’s comments feed my more overriding criticisms of her argument: she has nothing to say to people she doesn’t know about incurring risks for love; she doesn’t know what people in the specificity of their lives risk and what the depths of their love may be; and she is platitudinous and vacuous—we all tend to be risk averse; take great risks; follow your heart—all tricked out in fancy language and with learned examples and names being dropped here, there and everywhere.
If one wants to test her fatuity consider how attenuated and unspecific her advice is. When do we incur such risks: when we just have met Ms or Mr. Right in sharp juxtaposition with a spouse of some years whose attractiveness has lost its luster, with kids, with the pressures of work, with bills to pay, with illness present, with all manner of setbacks, when years of a difficult life together have settled into something manageable or congenial or just pleasant and companionable? That in the midst of life one might find a great love—a “soul mate” as they say—and decide to forsake one's spouse, children, promises, moral obligations, commitments and fidelities of course happens. But that isn’t necessarily incurring great risk for great love. And either side of the decision so to forsake could be argue persuasively.
People, not asking, don’t need prescriptions from Nussbaum, Nehring or anyone else on how to calibrate their souls so as to be open to great love or to be told pontifically what to risk for what.
My point is that Nussbaum is empty, unhelpful and self important, burying platitudes in the here soft pillows of her learning and philosophical name dropping.