The Waters of Love

A course of introductory lectures on

love, sexuality, marriage, and friendship

by Dr. Stephen Palmquist

Outline of the Main Points

PART ONE: The Metaphysics of Love (H20 Oceans)

This part introduces the course as a study combining philosophical and psychological modes of reflection, and applies this “philopsychic” approach in order to introduce and describe the relationships between four ideal types of love.

Week I. The Dream of Persons in Relation

These opening lectures explain why human beings should continue to work at realizing the ideals of love, even though in the real world we can never quite reach our goal. A philopsychic study of love should be rooted in real human experience, while seeking to understand this experience as clearly and systematically as possible.

Lecture 1. What is Love?

After reporting on a typical discussion with students about the question “What is love?” (where students suggest it is a gift, selfish, self-sacrifice, an emotion, eternal, physical, and irrational), this lecture gives an outline of the whole course and compares it with the outline for the other two RP classes the lecturer teaches at BU, concluding with the story of Tantalus as the “myth” that will guide this class.

Lecture 2. Dreamtime, Knowledge, and the Origin of Love

The biblical story of Adam and Eve provides a helpful symbolic expression of a profound truth: that love is integrally intertwined with the human search for knowledge. Knowledge requires a separation between subject and object, and this in turn leads to alienation; but alienation causes loneliness, which can be overcome only through love. A quick review of human history reveals that this is a consistent pattern right up to the twentieth century and the “age of love”.

Lecture 3. Philopsychy: Love as a Whole Person Quest

This lecture gives a brief summary of the contents of The Tree of Philosophy and Dreams of Wholeness and explains in more detail how those two previous courses relate to this one: “philopsychy” (“soul-loving”) refers to a study using both philosophy and psychology. A summary of the four topics dealt with in this course (love, sexuality, marriage, and friendship) is then provided, using two versions of a water metaphor: first H2O, steam, ice, and water; then oceans, clouds, rain, and rivers.

Week II. Rational Love: Two Fountainheads

This week’s lectures compare the Greek and Hebrew views of love and attempt to show how each is true from its own specific perspective.

Lecture 4. Love as Eros

Plato used the Greek word, eros, to describe the most fundamental source of all human love: desire. Eros starts with ordinary human appetites (especially sex) and aims to unify the lover with various objects of beauty. Philosophy’s task is to seek higher and higher levels of wisdom by eventually transcending the physical realm and learning to love the realm of ideas itself (especially truth, beauty, and goodness).

Lecture 5. Love as Agape

St. Paul used the Greek word, agape, to describe the most fundamental source of all divine love: self-sacrifice. Agape starts with God’s unconditional self-giving (especially as shown in the life and death of Jesus) and aims to provide a way for human beings to be unified with God. This love became the basis for the Christian religion, though interpreters disagree on whether or not human beings can also love in this way.

Lecture 6. Toward a Creative Synthesis

Whereas Nygren views agape and eros as contradictory opposites, and claims that each person must choose one or the other as the basis for their philosophy of life, D’Arcy sees them as complementary forces that work together to make love what it is. Although the two forms of love do indeed have many opposite characteristics, they also share several very important similarities: they both aim to overcome death, promote spiritual wholeness, free us from bondage to the flesh, and unify us with God.

Week III. Emotional Love: Two Forms

Whereas agape and eros are forms of rational love, this week’s lectures compare two forms of emotional love, arguing that each is true from its own specific perspective.

Lecture 7. The Rise of Romance in Courtly Love

After summarizing two typical romantic stories, several of the key features of romance are discussed: an obstacle must be present, the relationship will be based on shared feelings, rationally-based social standards tend to be ignored, and the individuality of the lovers tends to merge together.

Lecture 8. Parental Love and the Kinship Bond

In contrast to the way it was originally viewed in the courtly tradition, romance nowadays is typically considered as a preparation for marriage. But this leads to a paradox, since the lovers become family members once they get married, yet romance and kinship (family love) are opposites in many ways. Kinship is rooted in the absolute identity of the blood bond, enforced social norms, denies sexual freedom, and affirms individuality. Mother-love is the root of kinship, though father-love is also important.

Lecture 9. Freedom, Death, and the Metaphysics of Love

This lecture attempts to synthesize the four types of love (eros, agape, romance, and kinship) in several different ways. Eros and romance are both forms of desire, whereas agape and kinship are both forms of commitment; in each case, one is directed towards love of someone who is like the lover, while the other is directed to someone who is opposite to the lover. Viewed as a metaphysical process, eros is the starting-point and agape is the endpoint, with romance and kinship forming a tension in between.

PART TWO: The Logic of Sexuality (Steam Clouds)

By examining the physical manifestation of love in the form of human sexuality, this part attempts to do for our study what logic does for philosophy: i.e., it transforms the overly idealistic theories from Part One into a set of realistic distinctions that relate to our actual human experience.

Week IV. The Alchemy of Sex

After distinguishing between sexuality (the concept) and sex (the action), this lecture focuses mainly on the latter, examining the various ways sex is experienced, from the most intense (orgasm) to the most subtle (touching).

Lecture 10. Conceptualizing Sex: Love vs. Pleasure

Based on a typical class discussion on the question “Does sexuality have a logic?”, this lecture eventually concludes that sex has four purposes: pleasure, reproduction, expressing love, and power-play. Human sex differs from animal sex mainly by the fact that we must conceptualize what we are doing in order to do it well, whereas animals just do it naturally.

Lecture 11. Love’s Chemistry: Attraction and Orgasm

Four typical differences between male and female sexuality are discussed: males tend to be active, females passive; the female sex drive needs to be awakened, whereas the male sex drive is activated automatically at puberty; men tend to reach their sexual peak earlier than women; and women’s orgasms tend to take longer but also last longer than men’s. The lecture concludes with several observations about the paradoxical nature of an orgasm.

Lecture 12. Touching and the Significance of the Skin

Of the five senses, touching is the core and most important sense, because the other four can all be viewed as forms of touch. Attraction between sexes tends to happen in the form of an “erotic feedback loop”, culminating in orgasm. But for a relationship to be long-lasting, this attraction must be balanced by the “reverse feedback loop of agape”, ending in self-sacrifice.

Week V. Sexual Politics

Of the four purposes of sex, power-play is the one most people are least aware of, yet it is the most significant for both psychology and philosophy. This purpose implies that all sexual relationships are inherently political.

Lecture 13. Sexuality, Love, and the Origin of the Psyche

Focusing mainly on Freud’s theories, this lecture explores the psychological origin of love in the early development of the psyche. Freud believed the psyche passes through four stages in childhood: oral, anal, phallic, and latency. Reik’s theory of the differences between sex and love is also discussed.

Lecture 14. Seductive Power: Self-Love and the Stare

Sartre’s existentialist philosophy discusses the political implications of attraction, using “the stare” as an example of how lovers steal each other’s freedom. Feminism takes up a similar position, regarding male-female relationships as essentially power-based and therefore risking putting women in a position of oppression. The lecture concludes with some reflections on self-love and how it relates to four opposites of love: lust, narcissism, apathy, and hate.

Lecture 15. Sadism, “Good” Sex, and Sexual Perversion

Marquis de Sade’s radical views on sex are based on the idea that power-play is good and ought to be the sole purpose of sexual relations. This raises the complex issue of when sex is perverted. Numerous examples are discussed to illustrate how the four purposes of sex introduced in Lecture 10 can be used to assess the extent of perversion involved in types of sexual practice that can be considered as “gray areas” between obviously “clean” and obviously “dirty” sex.

Week VI. Spirituality and Sex

If the politics is interpreted as having not just an external application, but also an internal application, then the power-play aspect of sex may have some important implications for human spirituality.

Lecture 16. Tantra, Sexual Mysticism, and Sex Cults

Many religious traditions, such as the Hindu/Buddhist “Tantric” tradition, believe that sexual intercourse is a mystical experience that puts us into direct contact with the essential nature of the universe.

Lecture 17. Sex in the Bible: Knowing and Being Like God

The Bible regards sex as essentially good, because it expresses our spiritual nature, but as easily corrupted; the Old Testament laws regarding sex are therefore all ways of encouraging people to be responsible with their sexuality; and the New Testament intensifies this even further, regarding self-control as the most important aspect of both sex and spirituality, because God lives in our bodies.

Lecture 18. Divine Seduction as the Antidote to Death

God can be regarded as “seducing” us, in the sense of desiring spiritual purity from us, whereas our temptation is to practice our sexuality in a way that is cut off from our spiritual nature; this unification of sex and spirituality can be regarded as the most authentic religious response to the problem of death.

PART THREE: The Science of Marriage (Ice Condensations)

Marriage is the form of human relationship that enables us to get to know another person most deeply, but it requires wisdom in order to be carried out successfully; the commitment to love a person for the rest of your life can have a tendency to be like “ice” in both positive and negative ways: preserving the relationship yet killing passion.

Week VII. From the Ideal to the Real

Whereas the theories of love and sexuality in Parts One and Two were very idealistic, the theories of marriage and friendship will be more down to earth and realistic.

Lecture 19. The Nature and Purpose of Marriage

A student discussion gives rise to several interesting ideas about the nature and purpose of marriage, including that it enables people of the opposite sex to share a life together, to set up a home and care for children, to have legal protection for the possessions they share in common, to unite two families together, and (in monogamous societies) to tell the world that one is not “available” to other potential lovers.

Lecture 20. Marriage as a Crucible for Self-Development

According to the psychologist Carl Jung, the main purpose of the marriage relationship is to provide a context or “crucible” (= mixing container) for the personal growth of both partners, so married couples should expect conflict rather than thinking it is a sign of a bad marriage.

Lecture 21. Biblical Covenants: Polygamy vs. Celibacy

The Old Testament views polygamy (one husband married to many wives) as a normal and acceptable option, while the New Testament encourages believers to remain celibate (i.e., unmarried), but allows them to marry if they would otherwise not be able to control their sexual urges.

Week VIII. The Paradox of Conjugal Love

Conjugal love (i.e., love between marriage partners) is strangely paradoxical: the fact that a spouse is supposed to be a lover and a family member at the same time gives rise to all kinds of unexpected situations in most marriages.

Lecture 22. Conventional Marriage and its Alternatives

The type of marriage that has become conventional in most modern (Westernized) societies is romance-leading-to-monogamy (one husband marries one wife); many people in such societies still practice polygamy, but it appears in the form of serial monogamy (i.e., marriage, divorce, and remarriage). Traditional alternatives that are no longer practiced very much are polygamy and theogamy (marriage to God).

Lecture 23. Sex and Marital Stability amid Role Changes

Starting with courtship, when a couple must decide whether or not to have sex before they actually get married, the relationship between marriage partners is always in the process of changing; being prepared for the typical kinds of changes and being willing to accept such changes when the come are two important keys to a successful marriage.

Lecture 24. Narcissism, Intimacy, and the Crisis of Affairs

A properly functioning marriage will enable the partners to fulfill for each other their basic need for intimacy; but when this function is lacking, the natural human tendency to be narcissistic (self-loving) often impels one or both partners to find other relationships (called “affairs”) that will fulfill their need for intimacy.

Week IX. Models for Transforming Marriage

In all modern societies where conventional marriage is the norm, marriage is now in a state of crisis, because of how frequently marriages break down, often ending in divorce. If we can assess the reasons behind this crisis, then we may be able to come up with a workable vision of how marriage could be transformed in the 21^st Century.

Lecture 25. Does Love Have an “Expiration Date”?

One realistic way of dealing with marital conflict would be to expect one’s love to come to an end, and then renew the contract periodically, if both parties wish to do so. The question of when divorce is wiser than staying married can be answered by examining the way the married couple deals with conflict: couples with dead covenants sometimes stubbornly stay together when they would be better off apart; conflict should be creative, paving the way toward healing and personal growth, in order to be worthwhile.

Lecture 26. Open Marriage and the Problem of Fidelity

Although some couples have experimented with marriages that are “open” (i.e., based on contracts that are always revisable, and often allow sexual relationships outside the marriage), such arrangements seem to breakdown even more often than conventional marriages because the partners lack a sense of fidelity (i.e., faithfulness in love). Another option would be to legalize polyfidelitious marriage, allowing people to make a lifelong commitment to anyone they share intimate love with, rather than just having affairs.

Lecture 27. Divine Jealousy and the Idolatry of Marriage

The biggest problem preventing most people from taking polyfidelity or open marriage seriously is that such arrangements will almost inevitably provoke jealousy. In the Bible, jealousy is appropriate only for God; anyone who is jealous is taking up the position of God. Conventional marriage considers jealousy to be quite normal only because it makes marriage itself into an idol, as if it were as important as God—or even more so.

PART FOUR: The Ontology of Friendship (Water Rivers)

This concluding part of the class examines love using the branch of philosophy known as “ontology”, which means the “study of being”. This is the part of philosophy that attempts to understand the basic nature of the types of universal human experiences that make life meaningful. Just as steam and ice are essentially transformations of water, so also sexuality and marriage can be regarded as transformations of friendship.

Week X. The Philosophy of Friendship

Because friendship seems so familiar to us, we tend to neglect its significance as a type of love (just as we tend to ignore the sense of touch), yet understanding this manifestation of love may be the most important of all tasks in constructing a meaningful philosophy of love’s “being” (i.e., the true nature of love, and how we actually experience it).

Lecture 28. Being Friends vs. Being Lovers or Kin

A class discussion gives rise to several interesting suggestions about how friendship differs from romance and/or kinship, including: sexual attraction is usually part of romance, but not normally part of friendship or kinship; both lovers and kin may be possessive at times, but friends normally are not possessive; jealousy is usually strongest between lovers, moderate in families, and weakest between friends; romance requires exclusivity and obstacles, whereas kinship and friendship require polyfidelity and may or may not involve obstacles; we choose both our friends and our lovers, but we do not choose our kin.

Lecture 29. Friendship as Mutuality: Playmates, Workmates, and Soulmates

Aristotle’s theory of friendship distinguishes between three ways of making agreements between equals: playmates enjoy being together in order to share mutual pleasure and workmates enjoy being together in order to share mutual profit; but the highest level of friendship is shared between two virtuous people who enjoy being together simply for the good it does to them and/or to others. The deepest form of this third type of friendship is called a “soulmate”, who is someone so close that it is almost as if two bodies shared a common soul.

Lecture 30. Friendship Ethics: Loving Persons as Ends in Themselves

Extending Aristotle’s theory of true (virtuous) friendship provides a reliable guide to ethical decision-making, as suggested in the book, Situation Ethics. That book’s position is grossly misunderstood if we think the author’s identification of right action with action motivated by love refers to any type of love other than “philia” (the Greek word for true friendship). Badhwar, for example, extends Aristotle’s theory along Kantian lines by arguing that true friendship requires us to treat persons as ends in themselves, not as means to some other (“instrumental”) end; such friends are irreplaceable and evoke happiness.

Week XI. Obeying the Friendship Command

The Bible’s most important statement about love is that all religious laws can be summed up in the two commands, “love God” and “love your neighbor as yourself”. Since the Greek word “agape” is used most often in connection with this command, the equally important role of friendship (philia) is often misunderstood.

Lecture 31. Charity as Friendship with God and Neighbor

The medieval monk, Aelred of Rievaulx, argued that Jesus’ love command refers primarily to a special form of spiritual friendship: Christ as our friend unites us together and fills us with the ability to love all human beings the way God does, with “charity” (agape). Later, the theologian Thomas Aquinas developed the theory of charity in more detail, arguing that the “as yourself” indicates that self-love is necessary as the basis for love of neighbor.

Lecture 32. How Can Love Be Commanded?

Philosophers such as Immanuel Kant have pointed out that love in the ordinary sense of the word cannot be commanded, because issues relating to feelings or emotions are not relevant to moral commands; he therefore reinterprets the love command in terms of a universal respect for all human persons. Søren Kierkegaard, by contrast, argued that in Christian (neighbor) love we are actually empowered by God to love the God in every person. This comes close to treating God as a narcissist! Kant’s theory of friendship, by contrast, provides a simpler way of seeing how “love your neighbor” can be a command.

Lecture 33. Religion as a Community of Solitary Friends

The tradition of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) is an excellent example of how the love command, interpreted in terms of universal friendship, can become the primary basis for religious belief and practice. They have only a few simple doctrines, such as respecting God in every person, worshipping primarily through shared silence, participating actively in the improvement of the world, and promoting peace. The emphasis on silence promotes a healthy solitude in each Friend, making the community one of a healthy cooperation between individuals, rather than an unhealthy form of co-dependence.

Week XII. Friendship as the Heart of Love

A proper understanding of the role of friendship as the core aspect of all forms of human love can transform the way we view sexuality and marriage, as well as giving us new insight into the nature of ideal love itself, and our limited ability to understand it.

Lecture 34. The Transformation of Sexuality in Friendship

Because power-play is such an important aspect of human sexuality, sex tends to be a highly political issue in most cultures; this fact leads many people to assess sexual values from a purely external perspective. But when friendship, as an internal (or spiritually-focused) form of love, exists at the core of sexual relationships, it transforms external values, so that (for example) “virginity” refers to mutual respect rather than to the details of one’s sexual past.

Lecture 35. Marriage, Polyfidelity, and Intimacy’s Limits

Friendship is by its very nature polyfidelitous and includes a wide range of possible expressions of physical intimacy. The depth of intimacy ideally corresponds directly to the extent of physical tenderness shared between the two, except that for most people there is a limit beyond which friendships cannot cross without becoming more than “just” a friendship. Marriage partners should discuss this issue and agree on where the limit of intimacy in their other friendships should be placed.

Lecture 36. Philopsychy as Conversation between Friends

The soul-loving denoted by the term “philopsychy” should be understood as a form of friendship, carried out by means of a slow and respectful conversation between two persons who are willing to oppose each other. If such conversation is based on a fundamental self-love, it can solve the otherwise tragic problem of Tantalus: friendship can help heal the wounds in our souls even if we do not fully understand what love is.

This web page was first placed on the web on 15 November 2003.

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