ON LOVE

Luc Ferry is a French philosopher who has also served as Minister for Youth, National Education and Research in the French government. His collaborator Claude Capelier makes frequent dialogical appearances in this book, adding to the sharpness of debate. Ferry was originally inspired by a book of the same title by Stendhal – De l'Amour - which I read some 40 years ago. As frequently happens between different European cultures, there are omissions in the literature, the most striking being the work of Pitirim Sorokin with his great work The Ways and Power of Love. Sorokin had a very different metaphysical picture: he acknowledged the validity of mystical experience and the evolution of human consciousness towards the universality of the Divine Mind, while Ferry remains firmly within an existentialist and atheist framework, articulating a secular spirituality. Both, however, are concerned with the crisis of meaning.

Ferry argues that we have lost faith in the great ideals of the past, including God, the nation, revolution, freedom and democracy. Instead, he proposes love as a central value, a new principle of meaning and a new definition of the good life that has always been sought by philosophers. In an earlier book he coined the term revolution of love, referring to the decline of arranged marriages and the rise of marriages based on love, with an accompanying increase in divorce rates. Under previous regimes, mistresses were part of the equation and distinguished from wives, unless they themselves became new wives in their turn. A further interesting implication of this revolution is that we take more care of our children and of each other than in any previous historical epoch. The environmental movement represents the interests of future generations, which are now in the forefront of public awareness. The book not only discusses the revolution of love, but also its implications for politics, art and education.

In the introduction, Ferry analyses four previous principles of meaning, beginning with the cosmological principle of the Greeks travelling from initial chaos to reconciliation with the harmony of the cosmos. This is followed by the Christian theological principle as a result of which philosophy lost its autonomy, then the humanist principle implying an earthly salvation, and finally the principle of deconstruction arising out of 19th-century thought, especially Nietzsche. This principle of deconstruction has been particularly manifest in modern art, but also in modernism more generally. Ferry sees the overall dynamic as moving towards something more human, containing more human experience and liberating hidden dimensions. For him, this is also the elimination of transcendence: salvation is here and now, building on the great European culture of autonomy. The sacred is what one will sacrifice oneself for, in this case love.

In terms of politics, the ideas of the nation and revolution are in decline. Ferry characterises the first humanism as one of law and reason, the Enlightenment, the rights of man, French Republicans and Kant. The second humanism is based on feelings of fraternity and sympathy, embodied in the welfare state and our concern for future generations. Passions are arguably now more powerful than interests. In the first humanism, he writes of the violent disparity between ideals and the reality of their application - liberty and terror. The republican idea was trapped in nationalism and colonialism, but it also expressed itself in the idea of progress while traditional societies are rooted in the past. Progress means constant innovation and a corresponding emphasis on youth rather than wisdom. Ferry highlights the contribution of Claude Levi-Strauss with his critique of hierarchical ethnocentrism giving rise to a radical relativism that has permeated society at every level. On the one hand, this is valuable in considering other civilisations solely in our own terms, but on the other hand it leads to a philosophy that anything goes and is equal to anything else, thus evacuating the content of moral judgements and leading to a reductio ad absurdum.

On a different tack, the next chapter moves on to questions of art and education. Ferry makes an important distinction between upbringing as the business of parents, and education as that of teachers. He identifies three dimensions of European upbringing in love, law and works. The child who has been loved will be more self-confident and able to overcome obstacles. Children also need to know about law, in the sense of treating everyone equally despite personal preferences. Then works concern handing on our heritage of fundamental knowledge to our children. He sees the danger of love as imperilling respect for law and the knowledge of works. One is not expected to emulate the 90-page essay written by Nietzsche in Greek on the comparative merits of Sophocles and Euripides, but there has nevertheless been a decline in standards of literacy, aided and abetted by those who think that spelling is a matter of personal preference. Ferry advocates a training in effort, civility, listening to others, calmness, hard work and concentration, suggesting that this should be sorted out even before children start school. This sounds a little too precocious and French to me, even if I admire the sentiment. In France at any rate there has been a rise in illiteracy, and 150,000 young people emerge from the school system every year without any certificates or qualifications. Of even greater concern is the fact that 80,000 serious incidents are reported every year in French schools, such as violence, drug and weapons trafficking and sexual attacks. This is not so much a reflection of the school as of our society more generally. Ferry lays the main responsibility at the feet of parents who have not given children the kind of upbringing that prepares them to receive an education worthy of the name.

Turning now to art in an age of deconstruction and radical innovation, Ferry insists on the primacy of beauty and is highly sceptical of innovation for its own sake: 'without a relationship to beauty, why, quite simply, should art exist?' Using beauty as a criterion, much contemporary art is 'extraordinarily unsatisfying' and full of dubious innovations like heaps of coal or pianos on top of refrigerators. He interprets this as a conformist desire to provoke, while giving examples of beauty in modern art such as Boulez'a Le Marteau sans maître.

Ferry ends by considering two key questions: the contradiction between love and death, and the accusation that a philosophy of love is simply naive in the face of rampant greed, jealousy and egotism. As one would expect, he defends his position, observing that the modern individual is more exposed to grief without any religious relief provided by faith. He advocates learning to accept absolute mortality without succumbing to the temptation of religion. As for the second question, he maintains that an ethics and politics of love can be formulated as a new categorical imperative: 'Act in such a way that you can desire to see the decisions you can be applied also to the people you love most.' This new categorical imperative represents a shift from law to love and is linked to our sense of fraternity and sympathy. At this point, one might have expected a reference to Jeremy Rifkin's work on empathy, as Ferry is not alone in the direction of his thought. Even though I don't share Ferry's metaphysical perspective, I find it encouraging that this thought-provoking book articulates this new form of humanism.