The Meaning of I Love You

By John Alexander

In this essay 'John Alexander' meditates scholastically on the metaphysical basis of the phrase 'I love you'. A formal philosophical discourse on the nature of love, the essay suggests that love, in its deepest sense, reveals man's longing for a transcendent Being who is Love - Deus Caritas est.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 11, 2011
• ISBN: 9781447639558

John Alexander

John Alexander’s mother, Jennifer Alexander, was born into an army family in the early 1920s. She lived a full life; spending her childhood in India and travelling throughout Europe before air travel became unremarkable. During the Second World War, Jennifer served in the WRNS, hopping on planes to London for the weekend from her naval airstation in the Lowlands. Afterwards, Jennifer had two stints working at Queen magazine in the 1950s. In 1960 Jennifer married and the following year moved into the house in Surrey where the contents of Granny’s Kitchen Cupboard were brought to light more than 50 years later.

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Footnotes

Preface

I love you is an expression of the dynamism of man towards his own perfection. Man, however, as perfectible, needs something to perfect him. Does he love that perfective because it is perfect, or because it is perfective?

Such a distinction need not mean exclusion of either, for though nature loves itself, yet ultimately all things tend towards the Author of Nature.

Formal love, then, is that love which while moving according to the dynamics of nature, has its finality rooted in the possession of the object as Perfection for its own sake. The lover is considered in his three-fold role as a being, a sensitive being and a rational being. In the last part the essay attempts to determine the meaning of lovable in its rational and in its connatural aspects, concluding that I love you is in itself a metaphysical confirmation that human love ultimately tends towards God because He is Perfect Lovableness.

What is presented here is a minor scholastic divertissement reflecting metaphysically on love. A humble meditation on the transcendent love "che move il sole e le altre stelle, the essay echoes Augustine’s prayer that you made us for yourself and our heart will never rest unless in you."

Chapter One

The nature of the problem and its phenomenology

On a romantic evening by moonlight, a young man tells the girl of his choice: I love you.

Is he sincere?

You may say that only his successive behaviour could prove it. But let us suppose that he remains constant in his attachment. Let us suppose that he really feels he is in love with the girl. And, to crown his happiness, let us further believe that the girl is genuinely in love with him.

Is he sincere when he tells her I love you?

It is the purpose of this essay to answer that question by postulating that I love you is an expression of man’s dynamism towards his own perfection. For a man can love what perfects him not only because nature impels him to do so, but also because what perfects him is in itself perfect.

The essay concludes that formal love is that love which while moving according to the dynamics of nature, has its finality rooted in the possession of the object as Perfection for its own sake.

The main difficulty in analysing I love you can be summarised in these terms: Love is an appetite, and an appetite, of its own nature, tends to its own good.

It would therefore seem that every lover loves for his own good and for his own perfection. And, consequently, every lover loves necessarily himself.

Such a process would seem to entail that when the beau tells the belle I love you, he is insincere. It is not her he really loves, but himself. She would seem to be a mere instrument of satisfying his appetite: his love of loving, and his love of being loved.

The girl, therefore, if this interpretation is accepted, is only the projection of the lover’s self. And the finality of this projection is not altruistic, but egotistic.

As such, it would seem that love could never really be disinterested. The ego element would always dominate, and the genuine sincerity of love would be reduced to words, words and words.

I love you would mean I love myself.

It would be useless to try and explain the inexplicable. And Love, because it is a prime notion, cannot be fully explained. Perfect love is Permanently existing Being permanently desiring Itself, namely God. And to explain God would mean explaining his Essence.

We have therefore to proceed cautiously, trying to probe into the structure of those three words I love you knowing beforehand that we shall never fully explain them. As Hamlet told Horatio,

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy".¹

Now one is not embarking here on a discussion into the causality of love, psychological, psychoanalytical or otherwise, but rather to clarify as far as possible the metaphysical relationship of the lover to the loved.

The method used is to gather, firstly, the pertinent phenomenological data supplied by the words I love you, then, to evaluate them; and, thirdly, to attempt to interpret them in the light of the metaphysical order of being.

I love you

A human being, John, says he is in love with another human being, Jane.

John is one person, having one consciousness. It is the same