Grappling with love's dilemmas

The word "sententious" used to be an insult if you found it in a description of a serious book. Dispensing wise thoughts about how to live - what the Romans called "sententiae" - was thought to be rather tacky, and authors who cared about their critical reputation didn't do it, or at any rate didn't do it in plain sight. But the demand for guidance never went away. It seems to be a feature of human nature that we want to be supplied, not just with stories about how people behave, but with lessons we can lift out of them and apply to our own story. Think of Hollywood films: modern America is a very sententious culture, and the movies offer almanacs-full of advice. Think of the entire literature of self-help.

The only thing that has changed with the recent rise of philosophical self-help books is that sententiousness is having a turn at being respectable again. The twentieth-century tide of ideology has gone back down, and the problems of the individual life once more look like a plausible subject for ratiocination; maybe even the only game in town, till the next shift of intellectual fashion. So the serious-minded are foraging about to see what great books, and high culture, and industrial-strength mental activity, may have to add to the proposition that men are from Mars, while women are from Venus.

On the strength of this elegant little book, the answer seems to be: quite a lot. John Armstrong's field is the philosophy of art, and the learning he brings to bear on the dilemmas of love is consequently from the business end of philosophy - the parts concerned with making and looking and feeling. It's still a risky enterprise, trying to purvey what Aristotle or Schiller thought as sources of everyday illumination, but he has one big advantage. Love is a good subject for this sort of book, because it's genuinely universal, it touches all our lives one way or another. This means that he avoids the problem of comical disproportion that arises when we try to solve a work problem by asking what Julius Caesar or Ernest Shackleton would have done. When Aristotle talks about friendship, on the other hand, he really is talking about something we know. We don't have to pretend we're crossing Antarctica when we're only selling real estate.

And Armstrong also makes an excellent strategic choice. This book, he's careful to say, isn't about what love "means". That one English word means lots of different things, united only by what Wittgenstein called "a family resemblance". Instead, he's interested in philosophy's ability "to try to flesh out, with as much precision as the case allows, just what is at stake in the concepts we use". It's an attitude that lets history in, and allows Armstrong to do justice to the truth that in different times and places, people do very different things with the core of dispositions our species gets from its biology.

His question is always: what's going on here? He doesn't aim to solve dilemmas so much as to disentangle them, all along the line love takes from first enraptured glance through passionate delight to (if we're lucky) durable maturity. Why is it so important to feel recognised by the person we love? Why does imagination play a role in both infatuation and in real perception of the beloved?

Sometimes he falters, and he can't find quite the right words to clinch our experience in the clear language of thought. But sometimes his method works brilliantly.

Why, for example, is there a genuinely scary component in the image of Cupid randomly firing arrows at us? It isn't just the prospect, he points out, that who we find ourselves loving may be irrational. Lots of things are " irrational" in this sense: hunger, for instance, comes and goes without us deciding to be hungry. But we do decide what to do about it, and there's the frightening difference, that where love's concerned the action may be as helpless as the appetite. We're afraid that love is like, not hunger, but one of hunger's pathologies. "The golden or leaden arrows of Cupid transmit a bulimia or anorexia of love." It's still perfectly possible to be sniffy about the fashion for applied philosophy. But that misses the point. It's supposed to be useful; and the real test is whether the advice is any good. Armstrong's is perceptive and tender. You could do far worse than to give this book to your brain as a Valentine's Day gift. Or to present it to the cerebrum of your true love.