On What it is to Love

An Interview with Rick Anthony Furtak

Rick Anthony Furtak has been a Professor in the Philosophy Department at Colorado College for 20 years. He started working immediately after finishing his PhD at the University of Chicago where he wrote his dissertation called “Wisdom in Love” which was published in 2005. His research centers on “trying to make sense of love as a human experience through philosophers like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and the kind of early generation of existential philosophers (Furtak). In addition to philosophy, Rick has found mediation in the form of philosophical conversations at baseball games, riding public transportation, and spending time with his four small parrots. 

Anamnesis: In your view, is love more an inherent essence within us, or is it something we cultivate and refine over time? How do we balance the idea of love as both innate and something that requires growth? 

Rick Furtak: Obviously, we're born with not just the capacity to love, but we are born with aspects of our personality that are more unique to each of us. Mine is different from my sisters. Even though our experiences growing up were so similar, she's a very different person. And so, it can't be just a matter of being a specific gender, ethnicity, or religious tradition. I do think there's a capacity to love that human beings as far as I can tell, all have in common. But the way that our capacity to love takes shape, even if it's somewhat distinctive from the beginning, even if it's an innate thing that's a capacity we all have, but that our way of loving is more unique to each of us, then that capacity, whether it be the raw capacity to love or whether it be something like Rick's capacity to love yours. The way it takes shape in the world means that it's unfolding itself, our capacity to love in highly contingent and idiosyncratic circumstances. 

A: You mentioned being influenced by a dear friend of yours who also writes about love. You say that they believe in a more deterministic idea of love. We were very curious to explore whether love is predetermined or if it is something that can be created. If it is predetermined, then that would mean we have no say on who or when we love. It will just happen as it will. But, if it isn’t, then does that mean we can create it, and thereby manipulate it to our liking? Moreover, what does that more negative-leaning language mean for love? 

R: Jean-Paul Sartre has this line from later in his career when he was reconsidering his notion of radical freedom. He says: “We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us” (Sartre). What we can make of what others have made of us provides an element of freedom, but it also shows that we've got determinate situations and relations that also simply are what they are and we have to try to appropriate them in a way that's more free. But if someone you love breaks up with you and never wants to speak to you again, then I think it would be self-deceiving to say, well, I'm not going to be limited by the circumstantial fact, but rather, you know, I will try to find an interpretation of how this apparently devastating loss is still something I can live through and be myself on the other side of. 

A: I want to return to your idea of identity and how love manifests itself differently in everyone. Do you think love can be understood as a guiding force that shapes our identity, or does it instead reveal aspects of ourselves that were already present? In what ways might love both act as both a  creator and a mirror of the self?

R: If there's anything besides love that makes us who we are, I don't know what it is. But I also feel like, we're not simply determined, but that we are able to have some creativity in what love makes of us that we can know, even very powerful emotional motives can be resisted. And yet, I think we should ask ourselves very carefully what we want to resist because I think it's right to let love play the role in its life that it almost invariably does. And I think there are so many sad stories of how people have talked themselves out of love rationally speaking. Only to realize they should have trusted him even though it comes with no guarantees to do so. 

R: I have in mind the experience of myself and my closest friends and family members, but, of course, we're also shaped by the ideals that are put forward to us from culture, from movies. My mom watches a lot of the Hallmark Channel and I feel like the reason why this ideal of living happily ever after appeals to her so much is because deep down she knows that life is much more complicated than that. We can have major loves in our lives that don't end well, but they still shape who we are. When I got divorced, I wasn't ready to reflect on this, but years and years after the divorce, I started realizing, you know, I spent like a decade of my life with this person. I don't want to just erase that because it didn't have a happy ending. There must have been some good things to it or else we wouldn't have stayed together as long as we did. But that has taken years of therapy for me to even be able to admit because we're so brainwashed by the happily ever after story. 

A: Even if a relationship were to not end well, the experience of it still shaped you. Even the relationships that ended were not romantic. Families that have lost ties or friends that have exited your life.

R: Aristotle believed in philia, the friendship form of love.  An idea that love for another comes internally. For example, a child that you've never met that doesn't even know that you're its parent. I feel like there are good reasons for the diversity of terms to refer to love. There are also good reasons to have this general term love. All forms of love may be distinct in certain ways, but there is some common experience that's at the heart of all of them.

A: Which is why we can mourn not only a lost romantic love, but we can mourn all types of love. A friend, a family member, even a pet. 

R: I feel like any conception of love, which claims that we can only love beings that are as intelligent as ourselves, has this huge counterexample. That being a love of pets. I can not go to my pets and say, “Oh, I'm so bummed out because I got in an argument with this friend of mine” or “I didn't get this job I really wanted to get”. But they can pick up on my mood. They share my day-to-day routine. They don't care if you're smelly. They don't care if you're depressed. They just want to be with you and share their daily lives with you. 

A: Do you believe that love requires certain preconditions, shared experiences, mutual goals, compatibility, or can it arise spontaneously without these elements? How do these preconditions impact the nature of love? In our current political state that is so divided, do you think you can be in a relationship with another person whose core beliefs differ from yours? 

R: That's a highly pertinent topic to raise. The times in my life when I've experienced love at first sight, and there was one of these that was just incredibly overwhelming.It was someone I had met through, well, somebody that I knew at least a few things about. Prior to this. But first and foremost, it was just like I know there is such a thing as loving someone before you know them because I have had that experience. In an extremely powerful way. Whether you can love someone who has the same political opinions as you, my answer would be, I certainly hope so. Because I wouldn't want politics to somehow prevail over arrows. And there are going to be plenty of differences even if you vote for the same candidates and if you can't view that as part of the beauty of love. For example, how long do you like to cook your spaghetti or steam your vegetables? Like, how mushy do you want them to be? That's something that my wife and I always disagreed about, but it was not that that broke us apart. And that kind of compromise where, you know, she might make the veggies a little bit softer for me and I might make the veggies a little bit less soft. That kind of thing, that kind of difference isn't enough to sabotage love. 

A: How do you feel about the idea that society has influenced identity factors and the possibility of prevailing the chemical reaction that is love?  

R: But isn't it peculiar that we have those chemicals released for some people so much more than others. Who are equally attractive objectively speaking. And we have these colloquial ways of speaking that we'll talk about, well, just the other day I was talking with a friend about an actor and actress that I especially like and I was saying when she starred with so and so, they had such chemistry. Yeah. Yeah. Right? As if to acknowledge that we, you know, somebody who's a straight male may be on the lookout for attractive females even if he's married. But that you single this person out it just seems, you know, if we only could have an evolutionary biologist account for love, we wouldn't be able to grasp why we can get so single mindedly devoted to this person out of all the others who are equally lovable, equally attractive, and so forth. 

A: How might societal expectations shape our personal expressions and understanding of love? 

R: I think our culture and media hand us certain packaged ideals about what love ought to look like. And they often don't do justice to how difficult it is for one human being to love another in a way that's even partially successful. So, at the same time, I don't think our confusions about love can simply be ascribed to being brainwashed by certain ideals of love. I mean, those ideals have a possibility to them because it is possible to have people that you love who remain in your life for decades at a time for the large part or the entirety of your life. My parents have loved me for the entirety of my life. They're 75 years old now, and, if they're alive, they will love me. And if I'm alive, I will love them. And I've got friendships, relations with siblings, things like that that also stretch from my earliest childhood through hopefully my dying day. But when with romantic love in particular, I think there are pernicious paradigms out there. That we measure ourselves against, and then we find ourselves wanting. Lacking in comparison with them when that's not even what we should want. I mean, I think the best films about love are ones that really do justice to how it's complicated. I mean, we wouldn't want to simplify it if it weren't complicated in itself. So, we can only blame the media for so much. I mean, you could say Hollywood makes these romantic comedy films. And, therefore, Hollywood is to blame, but I don't think so. I think Hollywood is partly to blame, but the consumer of this art is at least half to blame. Why do we want there to be a Hallmark Channel? Why do you want to pay money to go see all these romantic stories? Well, because we want happy endings. But to me, any convincing literary work that has a happy ending, it's really got to earn it. Yeah. It has to somehow do justice to the great difficulty of love. Rilke said, “For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and … the highest task for a bond between two people” (Rilke). So how many of us even if we have those that we love in our life, how many people have come close to realizing the most difficult task of loving one other person with all our heart? 

A: Something to come back to the idea of why we want the Hallmark Channel, why we continuously gravitate towards these, like, idealistic virtues of love. Do you think that there is something sort of addictive about fantasizing about a perfect love? We like to live in that delusion because it's easier than having to face the harsh reality that love is a challenge. As bell hooks would say, love is a continuous practice. It is not passive, but rather active. 

R: Well, I think one of the worst aspects of the happy ever after story, the story that says they lived happily ever after is the ever after part. We want to know who we are going to end up with. You know? Who will be who will we be in love with, and who will we be in a close relationship at the time that we die? And that means that we focus on the endpoint more than the process. I mean, just because my wife and I didn't end up together as we thought we would at the time of getting married, we were still, you know, a part of a long relationship in which we affected each other. Changed each other and transformed each other in ways that are not all bad. And it kind of bothers me that, like, my family thinks that for my sake, they need to just put away all the photos. As if that whole 9 years of my life had ever happened. Whereas, you know, will I ever again have a 9-year romantic relationship? Maybe I will, maybe I won't. But if I do, I mean, I could have another 9-year relationship that ends disastrously. But I don't want it to be simply like it never happened in the first place as if that's the only way we can metabolize these losses. I learned so much about myself through this failed relationship. I still care so much for this person with whom I was in it. And so, there are two points here. One is that the best outcome is not necessarily that they live happily ever after. Maybe it's more like they learn from each other for 9 years and then they just can't keep it up for this or that factor. But they only could learn that fact by living through the years in between being together. So, the happily ever after story disposes us toward thinking we fall in love once and for all and if we're lucky it works out and then the end. That's not how life is. 

A: Love is often thought of as an agent of personal change. How do you see love's power to transform a person's values, beliefs, or a sense of self? Is this transformation unique to love, or can other emotions or experiences also initiate such deep changes? 

R: Well, I certainly think love can be transformative. It almost always is in one way or another. It might lead you to someone who has, you know, a different family background. I married someone from another religion than my own. And yet I feel like to this day, even years after my divorce, my own spiritual identity has been shaped by that decision to marry someone who's Jewish when I was not Jewish myself. I, you know, we can have transformative experiences of anger, but if we didn't have a love for something in the first place, we wouldn't get angry. If I didn't love my country, I wouldn't be angry that it just elected Trump. We don't get angry just by random, but I think it's by virtue of loving and caring beings. So, everything transformative can be traced, I think, to love. 

A: That's a great connection. The philosophy of anger has been well talked about, but only going in a forward direction. Franz Fanon and bell hooks have talked about anger as a tool or leading towards violence. But anger and it stemming from love is an important aspect of that emotion. We do not get angry unless we feel love somewhere for something in the situation. 

R: So, if there's a terrorist who wants to kill me because I'm an American, I might respect that person's reasons, but I'll do my best to get away from them. That terrorist loves certain ideals, nationalistic, spiritual ideals, and that's why he wants to kill me. I don't think there are people who just are moved without loving something favorably to do harmful things. 

A: Can we love authentically while simultaneously analyzing that love? Moreover, is love something that we should surrender to entirely? Or is there value in a reflective critical approach to it?

R: I certainly hope that we can love while reflecting upon that love and interpreting it, analyzing it. But I think that you can kill love through scrutinizing it, but that the more you're preoccupied with asking yourself questions like, do I really love this person? Are they really the one for me? The more we do that, the more we are at risk of intellectualizing our way out of love. Yeah. And I think if we're not just going to get stuck in that point of intellectualization, we do need to kind of throw ourselves into it. We have all these songs that are telling us what I think is really something true even if the way that message is conveyed can be pretty cheesy in a lot of cases. I can't help it, but we're falling in love. I'm not going to distance myself from that. There are not that many songs about, like, “Oh, I'm in love. I need to distance myself from it”.  However, I think we should be cautious, especially when there are, you know, these kinds of red buttons that, like, someone else has traumatized us because of having this attitude. And you put these walls up. The next person who comes along, like, they have that same attitude. I think we can reflect on this and say, why am I drawn to people with this attitude when having that attitude really harms me? But I also believe that we shouldn't avoid an emotion just because it overwhelms us and we can't control it.

A: It ties into this larger societal norm of pushing away what we cannot control. If I cannot understand it or it overwhelms me, I am going to choose to put it away and ignore it. It is the most efficient and easiest way to get through something. But I feel like that can not apply to true love. With an all-encompassing love, it is not efficient or easy to understand. It is a sort of one step forward, two steps backwards. As soon as you understand a little bit of how you are feeling, new thoughts come into play and you are back at the beginning. 

R: There are things that if you are willing to take a leap of faith and believe in them, the possibilities that materialize may be ones that you would have simply cut yourself off from if you had scrutinized it. Just try it out.

A: I would like to end our conversation asking if you think there will ever be a point in your career where you have figured out the mystifying idea of love? 

R: No. And I'm not sure that would be a happy outcome anyway.