Is Love ‘Desire in Disguise’?

As Roger Scruton explains in his book, The Death-Devoted Heart, for certain cynics, ‘love is no more than a story we tell ourselves in order to dignify desire’. Camille Paglia says something similar in Sexual Personae. Love, she says, is the spell by which man puts his fear to sleep: ‘It is a defense mechanism rationalizing forces ungoverned and ungovernable’.

This cynical view of love, which reduces it to a façade, is part of a larger effort to disenchant the world and reduce all things to some sort of mechanism. Freud, for instance, who saw psychoanalysis as the last great disenchanter, writes that the aim of love, and thus desire, is the ‘union of the genitals in the act known as copulation, which leads to a release of the sexual tension and a temporary extinction of the sexual instinct — a satisfaction analogous to the sating of hunger’. Scruton, however, disagrees:

This scientistic image of sexual desire gave rise in due course to the Kinsey report and is now part of the standard merchandise of disenchantment. It seems to me that if it contains any truth, it is because it has been accepted as true and, in being accepted, changed the phenomenon that it set out to describe. Freud’s theory is not a theory of human sexual desire in the social conditions which emerge spontaneously between rational beings. It is a description of sexual feelings transformed by a kind of scientistic prurience, and by an obsession with the human object that clouds awareness of the subject

The tendency to reduce love to physiological factors is, as Denis de Rougemont explains, ‘unintelligible’. If sexual desire is manifested as a hunger, then this hunger, like that for food, would seek to ‘obtain satisfaction at any cost’. Indeed, ‘the more ravenous, the more indiscriminate’ hunger becomes:

Hunger is directed toward the other only as object, and any similar object will serve just as well. It does not individualize the object or propose any other union than that required by need (Scruton)

But this is not the case with love. With love, an individual is more likely to resist indiscriminate satisfaction. In two turns of phrases, Scruton sums up the difference between desire (which is indiscriminate) and love (which is, emphatically, the opposite). With the latter, there is ‘a recognition of the irreplaceability of another life’. ‘The crime against love’, he writes, ‘is the admission of substitutes’.