Love, philosophy and cheap plastic pens
Love and Sexuality, Lecture 01
This is the first of a series of posts that follow my university course “Love and Sexuality.” I’ll post the video of each lecture, followed by a slightly edited transcript below.
Have fun!
Okay so welcome here! This is the first session of our class “Love and Sexuality.” The presentation in the video says number 2, because the first session was the introduction into the formal bits and pieces: the outline and the syllabus and all these things. But this is the first session in which we will actually talk about love.
Now, we are talking about the phenomenon of love. And we will talk about this from a more philosophical perspective. Obviously, love as a phenomenon has many different ways how we can look at it. You can look at love from the perspective of biology, talking about the mating of organisms, for example. You can look at love from a medical perspective; or from a biochemical perspective, examining what changes happen in your body when you are in love. Or you can look at it from a psychological perspective: how do we process the feelings and the emotions that go with love. You can look at it from a historical perspective: how has love developed over the course of history. You can look at it as a part of cinema studies: movies that talk about love and how they do it. You can look at love as a phenomenon in literature…
So all these are different, equally valid ways of analyzing the phenomenon. But what we will do here, because I happen to be a philosopher, will be to look at love from a philosophical point of view.
Now when we say “philosophy,” this doesn’t need to be anything scary. And I think that what makes philosophy be philosophy, what makes it different from other ways of looking at the world, is that the philosophical view on a thing is to not see things just in the superficial way that we are used to seeing them in our everyday life; but instead, to try to ask further and perhaps more interesting questions about these things.
So let’s briefly see what I mean by the “philosophical” view of a thing. For example, this pen:
If you see that as a normal, everyday person, you would say that this is a pen.
You can use it for writing, but this is not all there is to this pen. Obviously, this is a pen; but if I take the cap off, then this cap now has a different function. A cap without the pen might become a hazard to small children, since they could, for example, swallow it. And this pen itself now has become something different. The pen itself without the cap has suddenly become a weapon. I can use it to stab someone.
The whole thing also is more than a pen. It’s made of plastic, so you cannot just make this thing yourself. You cannot find, say, a twig somewhere and cut it to make this pen. You could use a piece of coal to write, but this is something different then. It would not be a pen like this. So if you want to use a plastic pen, you will need a factory to make these things. You cannot process plastic by yourself. But a factory means that you’ll need a building, and you’ll need machinery, you’ll need ways to distribute the pen; you’ll need trucks and containers and airplanes that will ship all these pens around the world and into your city, into the shops that will sell them. You’ll need a whole economic system built around this pen, in order to be able to produce even a single pen.
The factory itself will need oil. Now oil doesn’t grow everywhere. Oil comes from particular countries, so there is a whole web of international relations necessary, in order to get this oil at a price that is cheap enough, so that we can produce pens like this. So all our Middle East politics are mostly about getting the oil, so that we are able to produce these things that we make from plastic. And so you have international relations being part of this pen.
When this pen has been used up, when the ink is empty, what happens to it? We throw it away. But it doesn’t just disappear when you throw it away. What happens to it is that it goes to a landfill. So this pen then will disintegrate over time, under the influence of the sun and the elements, and it will become small pieces of plastic which then will re-enter the big circle of material that always circulates in the natural processes on Earth. So the microplastics from this pan will go into the ocean. Eventually there they will be eaten by fish, and later we will eat the fish. The pieces of plastic will fall as rain into our rivers and we will drink them. And at some point they might kill the fish, or they might kill us. So all this environmental destruction that is going to be caused to some small extent by this particular, individual pen is also something to consider. This pen is not innocent. This pen is not just something that I use to write and then forget about. This pen will come back to haunt me, in twenty years perhaps, as a disease that I will get, or as dead fish that have eaten parts of this pen. The environmental consequences of using this pen are part of what this pen is.
The social structures around this pen mean that somebody owns a factory that makes these pens. This person is a focal point at which the money of all the people who buy these pens is concentrated. So, in a capitalist system, this pen means that we have a social order that moves money away from individuals and concentrates it in the hands of factory owners. Another social effect of pens is that some pens (obviously not this one, but some people have pens that are made of gold and inscribed with their initials) — a pen like that is a status symbol. You use it in order to show that you are wealthy and so this is another function of the pen. It’s not only something used to write. It’s also something that creates and in part stabilizes a particular social order. All these forces and phenomena are part of what this pen really is.
Now, in this class, we are not talking about pens. We are talking about love. But what you’re supposed to take away from this is that many things, almost all things that we encounter in our everyday lives look simple and innocent like this pen or like the phenomenon of love — but when you think a little about them, things become a lot more complex and interesting.
And this is the point about being a philosopher. You don’t need to be a professional philosopher. You may be a person just occasionally interested in philosophy. But the idea is the same: being in this “philosophical” frame of mind means that you don’t just take the pen for what it superficially seems to be: “just a pen.” In the same way as there really isn’t “just a pen,” there is also not “just love.” It’s not a simple thing. And if you start thinking about love as we thought about pens, you will find that these are more complex phenomena, more interesting phenomena and that you can ask lots of questions about them that are fascinating and that offer insights into all kids of issues related to the human condition.
This is the first part of a semester-long series of lectures on the philosophy of love and sexuality. If you liked it, you might want to look for the other parts! Find all lecture videos together at: https://daily-philosophy.com/video-lectures/
Thanks for reading!
