IN DEFENSE OF LOVE

Probing the mystery of love.

Journalist and critic Rosenbaum, author of The Shakespeare Wars, among other books, contends that there is a fierce battle going on “for the soul of love.” He argues that it is under threat from a variety of fronts, including “brain-scan neuroscientists and their media popularizers”; “simpering pop philosophers”; “neo-Marxist dialectical materialists,” who see love as transactional; pop psychologists who consider love to be a “drive” rather than an emotion; the pornography industry; and, surprisingly, literary theorists. While scientists try to define love as a quantifiable chemical reaction, literary theorists seek to “historicize” love as an imaginative “construct,” positing that “the language of love is what has actually created love.” Rosenbaum is passionately offended by these efforts and devotes himself to defending love “as an irreducible ontological entity,” far different from the propositions emanating “from pseudoscience and sophistry.” Readers who don’t share his outrage may find his response overwrought. He focuses much ire on Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist who has been called the “Queen of Love Science,” whose findings have been widely publicized. Basing her conclusions on fMRI scans, Fisher explains love as chemistry. She has analyzed individuals’ “trait constellations” to conclude that there are “chemical types that determine who you can or should fall in love with.” Rosenbaum finds that conclusion preposterous; love, he asserts, “is not an algorithm.” The author draws on a wide range of sources—including philosophy (Plato, Thomas Nagel), poetry (Sappho, Shakespeare, Larkin, Yeats, Auden), and fiction (Lev and Sofiya Tolstoy, Austen, David Foster Wallace, and Chekhov, among others)—to make the case that love is “evanescent and contingent and unpredictable.” His own history of love bears out that conviction, and part of his motivation for exploring the meaning of love, he reveals, has been finding, finally, the love of his life. “Love,” he is certain, “is a kind of entanglement between two consciousnesses.”

Impassioned but often strained.