Do we, as human beings, need love? In The Creative Encounter, Howard Thurman affirms that we do.
Thurman articulates this universal human need for love in terms of the development of personality. Thurman quotes the 1951 report A Healthy Personality for Every Child, which states that the “human being does not have a personality; he [or she] is a personality.” From there, Thurman contends that “the need for love is so related to the structure of the personality that when this need is not met, the personality is stunted and pushed or twisted out of shape. Here we are not dealing with some luxury item for personality but rather with an utter necessity” (101).
Thurman first analyzes this in terms of a child’s need for loving care, essential because it “is responsible for the establishing of a pattern of response to other human beings that makes possible all forms of community and relatedness between human beings in society” (105–106). Human life includes the universal experience of pain; to experience love from one’s earliest days is to sense that one’s own pain is meaningful to others and, in turn, to learn how to regard the pain of others as meaningful to oneself. From there, Thurman builds toward conceptions of love of oneself and love of God which, taken in the context of his larger body of work, point also to ethical demands to love one’s neighbors and enemies.
Where Thurman speaks of love, he nearly always speaks of it such that romantic love is but one of its many possible manifestations and certainly receiving less direct analytical attention than other such manifestations that concerned Thurman more greatly. Though I don’t fault Thurman in the slightest for this orientation, I wish to think through a conception of romantic love and the experience of needing it using philosophical insights from Thurman. My aim, then, is not to give an account of what Thurman would have said about romantic love, nor to give an account of romantic love that is concerned above all with being faithful to Thurman’s ideas. Rather, I simply want to employ elements of Thurman to make sense of human experiences of needing to love another through the template of romantic love.
In The Creative Encounter, only a brief stretch of text could be considered to address the matter of romantic love. There Thurman writes that at the adult level, “the need is for being understood, for being accepted in terms of one’s intrinsic worth rather than merely what one does” (106). This echoes the trope of young lovers who aver they’ve finally found someone who gets them. Nonetheless, understanding is a social phenomenon far broader than love, much less the narrow case of romantic. In the absence of love, one still may be understood by strangers, enemies, etc. One could perhaps make the same case for being accepted for one’s intrinsic worth, but in any event, this by no means requires romantic love; to be loved by one’s neighbors is to be accepted in terms of one’s intrinsic worth.
In short, we might contend that Thurman’s conception of the need for love would render romantic love extraneous and beside the point. As long as we can get what we need from anyone, why would our need invoke the notion of finding a “special someone”? Here the point can be put in terms of anonymity. Loving one’s neighbor can function at a purely anonymous level: I don’t need to know who you are; I just need to acknowledge that what you are merits my recognition of your intrinsic value and treat your pain as meaningful. To love my neighbor calls, ultimately, for loving one whose identity means nothing to my love, since their humanity suffices. The same goes for loving one’s enemy: my enemies may have made themselves known to me, and we may have established a relationship of enmity in which this enemy and I are meaningfully antagonistic toward each other in a particular and idiosyncratic fashion. But I am not ethically counseled to love this enemy because it is this enemy; that counsel is a matter of loving any enemy.
Romantic love, though, involves this person being loved by me. It seems to involve what I term nominity—that is, the conceptual opposite of anonymity (think “ignominity,” dropping the “ig-”). Relations between people can involve both anonymous and nominious dimensions, such that we can conceive of them as functioning purely anonymously in some cases but on a “first name basis” in others. The call to love one’s neighbor understands the neighbor anonymously; it doesn’t matter who your neighbor is for the maxim to apply. Being a good neighbor might, of course, also require learning the names of one’s immediate neighbors. But the simple point is that “Love thy neighbor” applies before one has learned any given neighbor’s name or life story.
In romantic love, nominity seems necessary: I can’t love someone romantically without knowing who they are. Of course, the sense of who I’m invoking is broad enough that we can make sense of it in contexts where names may not yet be involved: two lovers can fall in love in a context where they might otherwise be anonymous. The love can, in principle, precede the exchanging of names. The issue, though, is such love is expressed as pertaining to “You—not any of them.” We can, of course, raise the issue of romantic love involving more than two parties, as in throuples. But what changes there is not nominity but the number of people over whom the phenomenon functions.
An illustrative example, by way of negation, is the case of anonymous sex. Many people seek out anonymous sex and even communities and technologies that make access to anonymous sex routine. While reasons people pursue anonymous sex are myriad, many desire it as a prophylactic to romantic love. The insistence on anonymity often aims at preventing romance from breaking out, since that way lies nominity. The prophylactic may be fallible: some seeking anonymous sex find themselves infected with the sense this person brings something special to the table, inviting an ethical quandary as to whether to violate the norm of anonymity so that a nominious relationship may blossom. We might even say in such cases love of one’s neighbor is invoked to preserve anonymity, since care for the other’s intrinsic worth may be defined as respecting their desire for things not to become complicated.
If, as I have contended, Thurman’s conception of the adult need for love can be achieved at the level of anonymous social relations, the case for needing romantic love would rest on establishing the importance of fulfilling this need in nominious forms. Thurman’s account of affirming intrinsic worth would seem to present a problem. Acceptance there does not rest on what one does, so such acceptance can unproblematically be a matter of what someone is rather than who someone is. If we understand who we are as inextricable from what we do, we might conclude that the love Thurman has in mind would require anonymity as its source, even if in practice those who love need not remain anonymous to each other.
Here we might invoke Stephen Darwall’s distinction between “appraisal respect” and “recognition respect.” If I affirm your intrinsic worth as another human being, I afford you recognition respect; I acknowledge that what you are demands recognition. If I deem you worthy of respect reserved only for those who merit it, this is appraisal respect, which would be unintelligible outside a nominious sense of who you are and what you’ve done such that you can be distinguished from others. If Thurman’s case for the adult need for love comes down to merely understanding and affirmation, then it would seem to be satisfied through the anonymity of recognition respect and prior to the interventions of romantic love or appraisal respect. Some readers of Thurman might simply stop here and declare romance surplus to requirements. Nevertheless, many human beings express a felt need for romantic love. What is the meaning of this expression, and can we conceive of it as a genuine need?
To answer these questions, we may consult other resources in Thurman. In Disciplines of the Spirit, Thurman begins by noting “At the core of life is a hard purposefulness, a determination to live. There is something dogged and irresistible about the methodical way life pounces upon whatever may be capable of sustaining it, and will not release it until its own sustenance is guaranteed or fulfilled” (13). Thurman regards this phenomenon as involuntary and automatic: it is an inescapable aspect of what life is. Thus, internal to the phenomenon of life, Thurman surmises, is a structure of commitment: to live is, in a sense, to already have been committed to sustaining life.
The living organism is directed, by the nature of life itself, toward self-sustenance. Where life is imbued with mind and spirit, this direction does not vanish, but possibilities to direct it at yet another level arise. Spirit makes possible life that is self-directed toward its sustenance and survival. “Commitment,” Thurman writes, “means that it is possible for a man to yield the nerve center of his consent to a purpose or cause, a movement or an ideal, which may be more important to him than whether he lives or dies. The commitment is a self-conscious act of will by which he affirms his identification with what he is committed to” (17).
Thurman conceives of commitment as “the act by which the individual gives himself [or herself] in utter support of a single or particular end” (19). Since this entails human life recapitulating the core of the life-process itself, Thurman views human acts of commitment as enriching and reinforcing vitality: “When a man is able to bring to bear upon a single purpose all the powers of his being, his whole life is energized and vitalized” (19).
Describing human commitments in biological terms, then, they are cases of life ordering life. Thurman writes that “man’s relation to life occurs within a responsible framework—he lives and functions in an orderly context, an essential milieu in which order and not disorder is characteristic” (22). Commitment is creative in terms of bringing a novel direction to life, but such creation reproduces the preexisting structure of life itself, its directedness toward ends.
Suppose, then, we conceive of romantic love first and foremost in terms of a nominious commitment. In romantic love, I direct myself toward the end of loving you, a special someone, in a way I shall not love others. Romantic love establishes an end whom I regard as unlike anyone else. Such love does not excise love’s anonymous forms from my life: I may love my neighbor as a neighbor in addition to my quite distinct love for my romantic partner. Nor does it make anonymous features of relating to my romantically-beloved vanish: if I do not afford my partner recognition respect, I am at least unlikely to meaningfully express appraisal respect to my partner. Nonetheless, romantic love involves a commitment to treat my partner as a nominious source of ends, as someone to whom I must direct myself, someone whose needs and wants meaningfully function as wants and needs of my own.
The text of Thurman’s speaking most directly to the significance of this commitment is “The Experience of Love” in The Inward Journey. There, Thurman writes that in love, “there is robust vitality that quickens the roots of personality, creating an unfolding of the self that redefines, reshapes, and makes all things anew” (36). A romantic commitment is life ordering life such that the personality, which one ultimately is, extends its roots more deeply into the firmament of the world. Deeper roots in place, the above-ground elements of the person flourish, taking on new depths, dimensions, or forms.
This suggests we might conceive romantic love as occurring in an existential adolescence. If we conceive of existence as a mode of being in which one is conscious of one’s being and its temporal situatedness, we may conceive of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood as modalities of such existence. The child’s consciousness of the meaning of this existence is of necessity incomplete, though how it is incomplete in the context of any given child’s life is a contingent matter. I take this as conveying part of the meaning of Thurman’s view that children are innocent; while, following Anna Julia Cooper, I find this view to be axiologically troubling, it is coherent as an understanding of childhood’s existential meaning. Because children cannot yet grasp fully what it means to exist, we might demand certain behaviors of the child but not genuine existential commitments; a child’s failure to commit demands our forgiveness.
In existential adulthood, by contrast, one is undeniably conscious of one’s life as involving some intelligible degree of existential duration. Even where the adult’s life can be made sense of in terms of a plurality of commitments and even identities, the adult nonetheless has a meaningful sense of a unity occurring alongside such pluralities. The existential adult’s “relation to life occurs within a responsible framework,” and although this is true of the existent in general, the existential adult lives this relation in such a way that that responsibility for a durational life is coherent, if not necessarily fair.
Existential adolescence is thus that band of existence between existential childhood and existential adulthood. In existential adolescence, we face the condition of relating meaningfully to the commitments we shall now make, even though such responsibility implies a degree to which the slate of prior commitments has been wiped clean. The existential adolescent faces a world forgiving of what one has done in childhood, though still inheriting the qualities imbued by that childhood which, alongside the commitments one now makes, shall produce who the existential adult to follow shall be.
The adult, Thurman has shown, needs understanding and affirmation. The same goes for the adolescent because the adolescent confronts adult responsibilities. Adult responsibilities pose the danger that one’s errors may result in a world that, in the name of a deficit of one’s meriting appraisal respect, revokes even the conferral of one’s recognition respect. Such a result is hellish for the adult, but to the existential adolescent, it is inconceivably hellish since it entails being condemned for who one is prior to genuinely having become that person.
What the existential adolescent needs, then, is to be understood and affirmed such that what one has done does not obscure affirmation and understanding of who one can come to be. The need for love in its anonymous facets for the existential adolescent is thus for the adult, but the existential adolescent needs to augment it with nominious love. The existential adolescent needs someone who can say, “I understand who you are, such that I affirm who you will become.”
Such love recapitulates the structure of loving care for a child, but that loving care has an anonymous foundation: I understand what you are, so I affirm what you can be. Loving care for children is rooted in the sense that all children deserve it. This is not to say love for the child remains strictly anonymous. Normally, such love will develop an additional dimension of propaedeutic nominity, where parents, guardians, relatives, and teachers come to learn and affirm who the child is, which introduces the child into a world of accountability for one’s commitments. Yet no one involved can or should forget the anonymous source of such love, its affirmation of this child’s intrinsic worth prior to it having done anything.
The existential adolescent, though, faces an implicit need to be understood and affirmed first on the basis of nominious aspects and only secondarily on anonymous ones. As an existential adolescent, I need someone who can love me for who I am, such that I can confront the adult task of making commitments through which both who and what I am shall take on new meaning and order my existence in an ineffaceable way.
This analysis implies further the existential adolescent’s need not only for love but to love. To enter into a loving romantic relationship is to make the kind of commitment that creates order for the life-process, directing oneself toward meaningful ends that quicken the roots of one’s personality. This isn’t to say it’s the only such commitment possible. The adolescent may make commitments that affirm the intrinsic worth of all humanity, commitments that foster love of one’s neighbors and/or enemies. Indeed, such commitments are quite typical of adolescent life. The problem, though, is that the existential adolescent lacks a full grasp of the meaning of a durational existence and thus lacks, among other things, a depth of perspective on the difficulty of loving one’s fellows. As a propaedeutic to the existential depths of adult love for humanity, committing to romantic love in adolescence prepares one to have a canny sense of the perplexities that any love whatsoever entails. Because this commitment involves loving who one’s beloved is—indeed, loving this “who” as it transitions to “who it is in the process of becoming”—the pedagogical effects are heightened. The difficulties of affirming what someone is become even clearer once one has passed through the arduous process of learning to genuinely affirm who someone is.
Taking such analysis seriously entails not mistaking existential adolescence for biological adolescence. Our biological conception of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood is linear, proceeding in strict succession. But the existential terms here are defined in terms of consciousness of one’s durational being. The contingency of consciousness means a biological child may, under some circumstances, need to confront existential adolescence rapidly and proceed into existential adulthood, sometimes before even attaining biological adolescence. Likewise, some biological adults may have never departed existential childhood, particularly where social orders afford an enduring air of a priori innocence (as when, e.g., the abusive antics of rich men are ascribed to “boys being boys”).
We may expect adults, including the elderly, to experience this existential adolescence even after having already experienced decades of existential adulthood. Existential adults may experience loss or stagnation that throws the orderly sense of one’s existence into disarray, negating the sense of prior commitments as having necessitated the meaning of one’s existential duration. The adult that feels the need to change who one is may create the conditions for a second existential adolescence (or third, fourth, fifth…). Romantic love under such conditions may often be experienced as no more and no less than a need. Hence, changing circumstances often occasion new romantic commitments. Yet this account doesn’t imply that such change can only call for novel romance. Reaffirmation of prior loving commitments can achieve the nominious affirmation and understanding that our return to existential adolescence occasions the need for; what matters, on this account, is not the novelty but the nominity of such love.
Romantic love, then, as a nominiously loving commitment to another—a particular other, and not just any other—can be understood as a discipline of the spirit, a mode of life creating its order so as to confront the daunting depths of existence.
Is my account here compatible with Thurman’s philosophical corpus in its entirety? I will leave this for the reader to decide in light of a more thorough study; my concern in this space is limited to how Thurman’s thought facilitates a conception of the meaning and function of romantic love, rather than a broader exercise in Thurman scholarship. Indeed, I fear in doing so I may invite unnecessary conflict. I have tried to develop a sense of the meaning of romantic love but not its value as such. What I see as Thurman’s inattention to romantic love can easily be explained in terms of Thurman’s profound attention to the matters of loving children, neighbors, enemies, oneself, and, above all, God. It may very well be that the value of the love of God, on Thurman’s conception, renders these strict concerns with romantic love irrelevant; perhaps romance is no more than existential juvenilia. I will leave it to the reader to consider the axiological and religious significance of what I have sketched here, as I am content with merely offering a description of its existential significance, which can set the stage for questions of value but not resolve them.
Nonetheless, I shall close by stating my conviction of the value of understanding romantic love’s meaning, at least if my account is not totally off the mark. We might rightly conclude from my notions of existential childhood and adolescence that, in these periods, a clear sense of the meaning and function of romantic love must be opaque. Any value in these reflections may perhaps be reserved for adults only. Yet to existential adults whose existence has been meaningfully ordered by romantic commitments, losing sight of the function and beauty of such commitments constitutes a genuine loss. Meditating on romantic love as a discipline of the spirit, then, may renew the sense of meaning that sustains us in existential adulthood. Where such meditations are neglected or occluded by life’s din, one may be thrown back into existential childhood, made all the worse if a sense of one’s own innocence and vulnerability engenders a refusal to honor the debts to the world one has genuinely accrued. For one who experiences this vicious, romantic love remains as one possible path, arduous yet beautiful, back toward a life of redemption, reconciliation, and existential maturity. For one committed to sustaining an already extant adulthood, though, apprehending the beauty of romantic love is a beautiful renewal of one’s creative vitality in its own right.
Thomas Meagher
Thomas Meagher is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Sam Houston State University. He specializes in Africana philosophy, philosophy of race, phenomenology, political theory, existentialism, and philosophy of science. Meagher earned his PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2018 and has previously been a Visiting Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a W. E. B. Du Bois Visiting Scholar Fellow at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
