love, which has room for the full gamut of human experiences and emotions, positive and negative, happy and sad.
Eudaimonic love means literally “good-spirited” love. It’s going to take me a while to explain what the relevant “spirits” are, but along the way I’ll be able to explain what eudaimonia does (and doesn’t) have to do with romance, and happiness, and finding meaning in life. I have stopped asking the old question I was taught to prioritize – how to be “happy ever after.” This question doesn’t interest me anymore. It doesn’t look significant.
I just ambitiously promised a “new theory.” A new theory? Like a great new idea? A work of startling original genius?
The myth of the great idea works in much the same way as the myth of the “great man.” In fact, the two mythologies go hand in hand: we imagine our “great men,” such as Darwin or Newton, coming up with their “great ideas,” such as evolution or gravity, and we imagine them doing it all alone, as if they existed in an intellectual vacuum. We ignore the contributions of other people, especially “inconsequential” people, such as Darwin’s hairdresser, who chatted to Darwin about his experience with pedigree dogs.8 And we ignore the influence of existing ideas, especially ideas we don’t consider respectable, such as alchemy and the occult,9 which fascinated Newton and were hardly irrelevant to his willingness to theorize “unseen forces” at work in the universe.
In reality, great ideas grow, live, and die in, and as parts of, intellectual ecosystems. (So do terrible ideas, of course. And mediocre ideas.) When I promise you a new theory, what I’m promising to do is build you something out of bits and pieces I’ve found swirling around in my ecosystem. Some of them are very old, and some have only just appeared. I work like a magpie, gathering shiny ideas from my environment. A curator. Most of what I’m gathering is not rocket science (although it is, in some cases, science). But it’s what I’m trying to build from it that matters.
I’ll have a “new theory” if I find enough shiny pieces to build a mirror, and that mirror shows us something we need to see.
Notes
1 1. Barbara Rosenwein provides an insightful commentary on some of love’s constitutive fantasies in her book Love: A History in Five Fantasies (Cambridge: Polity, 2021).
2 2. What Love Is And What it Could Be (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
3 3. You can find a selection of them at www.carriejenkins.net/magazines and www.carriejenkins.net/radioandpodcasts.
4 4. I got hate from feminists – or at least from people who thought of themselves as feminists – for challenging the prevailing norm that all relationships should be monogamous. I had the impression that this critique came from people who had heard only that I was personally non-monogamous, and who weren’t familiar with my critique of how the institution of compulsory monogamy sustains the patriarchal status quo.
5 5. These intersections of sexualized and gendered racism were less surprising to my partners.
6 6. Thi Nguyen offers an excellent description of this phenomenon in “Gamification and value capture,” chapter 9 of his new book Games: Agency as Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
7 7. Recent work on this phenomenon includes Jin Kyun Lee’s “The effects of social comparison orientation on psychological well-being in social networking sites: serial mediation of perceived social support and self-esteem,” Current Psychology (2020), pp. 1–13, and Schmuck et al.’s “Looking up and feeling down: the influence of mobile social networking site use on upward social comparison, self-esteem, and well-being of adult smartphone users,” Telematics and Informatics 42 (2019), pp. 1–12.
8 8. See e.g. Charles Darwin: Voyaging, by E. Janet Brown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
9 9. See “Newton, The Man,” by John Maynard Keynes, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Extras/Keynes_Newton/.
Acknowledgements
I am immensely grateful to Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Tyler Nicol, Robin Roberts, Kupcha Keitlahmuxin, Mezzo, Drusilla, and Seven, and to all the good daimons in my support network of friends and family.
For conversations, questions, and comments I am indebted to Chase Dority, Alice Maclachlan, Shannon Dea, Alan Richardson, Jasper Heaton, Jelena Markovic, Chelsea Rosenthal, Dominic Alford Duguid, Cat Prueitt, Kim Brownlee, Chris Stephens, Fatima Amijee, Keith Maillard, Ray Clark, Adriana Jones, Marian Churchland, Jessica Lampard, Alyssa Brazeau, Susan Sechrist, and Ray Hsu. Thanks also to audiences at the University of Manitoba, Simon Fraser University, and the Minorities and Philosophy Flash Talks series, who gave me comments on earlier versions of the material.
My patient editor Pascal Porcheron, and two anonymous readers for Polity, gave me substantial feedback that helped me shape the book into this final form.
Parts of the text and/or related materials appear in previously published work:
“When Love Stinks, Call a Conceptual Plumber,” in E. Vintiadis (ed.), Philosophy by Women: 23 Philosophers Reflect on Philosophy and Its Value (London: Routledge, 2020).
“Love isn’t about happiness. It’s about understanding and inspiration,” New Statesman, April 2020.
“How to ‘love-craft’ your relationships for health and happiness,” The Conversation, September 2018.
The work was completed on the traditional, unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
Introduction
Tell a philosopher you love her, and you’d better be ready to define your terms.
It’s funny because it’s true. Well, sort of. Some philosophers spend their entire working lives on questions of definition or the analysis of concepts. And this is not a pathology. It’s important. Put a concept such as love under the microscope and you see how vague and fuzzy it is. How layered. Where the spiky bits are. Patterns invisible to the naked eye suddenly become fascinating objects of study.
That’s why some of us spend our whole lives trying to get a better look. Philosophy, when it’s working well, offers us a treasury of intellectual and imaginative tools: new ways of seeing things. Conceptual microscopes, of course, but also conceptual telescopes, and distorting mirrors, and tinted lenses … we need all kinds of different approaches. We need to examine our concepts close up, but we also need to get a better look at the ones that feel remote, and we need ways to look at things from new angles, through different filters. That includes the things we think we understand, the things most familiar to us. In fact, it’s especially important to examine those, as they’re often highly influential in structuring the way we live (whether or not we appreciate their playing that role). Deflecting and diffracting our most familiar images can reveal something totally new, perhaps something we would never have imagined it was possible to see.
As I suggested in my preface, this particular book is an attempt to build a conceptual mirror. I’m trying to reflect back to us an image of ourselves, and specifically of our ideas and ideals of romantic love. It’s not an entirely flattering image, the one I end up with. It’s almost grotesque. No doubt there are some distortions. But, as I said, sometimes we need a new angle, a vantage point from which the familiar looks weird.
I start from a curiosity about the real lived experience of sad love – love that defies the assumption that love stories end in “happy ever after.” Sad love in