Love & Metaphysics

Peter Graarup Westergaard explains why love is never just physical, with the aid of Donald Davidson's anomalous monism.

- Peter Graarup Westergaard

Most people have felt the gap between the consciousness of love and the physical aspects of love. Science, even if it could describe all the hormonal changes, the chemistry of smells, and the social conditions of love, would still not able to accurately predict who will fall in love with whom.

Metaphysical dualism, which distinguishes the mind from the brain, might explain the difference between physical love and the consciousness of love. Indeed, I want to argue here that being in love as a mental state is a challenge to all materialist theories of mind, including behaviourism, type-identity theory, and physicalism. I’ll argue that you need to be a dualist at least about mental and physical properties, otherwise you will meet overwhelming challenges trying to understand the consciousness of love. However, you do not need to be a substance dualist like René Descartes. Rather, to metaphysically understand the consciousness of love, it is my suggestion that we should look in the direction of Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism.

Reductio ad Absurdum de Eros

Descartes argued that each of us has a physical brain – subject to the normal laws of cause and effect – and a non-physical mind, with the two interacting in a part of the brain called the pineal gland. This ‘Cartesian dualism’ – or variants on it – was the dominant philosophical view for a long time. In his 1949 book The Concept of the Mind Gilbert Ryle famously attacked this kind of dualism, calling it “the dogma of the ghost in the machine.” Instead he favoured behaviourism, where mind is an aspect of behaviour and mental events are reflexes produced by a response to stimuli under certain conditions.