Why Shakespeare is wrong about Love

This is a cross-posting of two pieces I posted on the Family blog Devenish, which is now suspended. When I started regular posts on Devenish last year, I wasn't quite sure what the project was. I think I know now: this is part of it.]

...And jealousy, Time and infinite longing. So nothing serious, then. Click to play. 

Let’s start with Shakespeare and me. First, the words of one of his most famous sonnets, which I now recall was read at our wedding ceremony…

 

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove;
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark

 That looks on tempests and is never shaken 

It is the star to every wandering bark
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheek
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

…then the words I wrote a few weeks ago on the topic, with particular reference to the love of one’s children:

There is no such thing as unconditional love, beyond the intoxication of adolescence. There are always strings. It’s simply that for our children we are infinitely willing to alter the conditions of our emotional contracts, on the turn of a dime......whereas for most other people we are not: in the case of other adults, we prefer to maintain the illusion of personal integrity, and clinging forever to the letter—rather than the spirit—of the original document. As if were real...

Clearly both of us can’t be right: either Love alters when it alteration finds (as I suggest), or it alters not—[it] is an ever-fixed mark (as Will would have it): there is not much wriggle room.

Now, I shan’t for a moment claim any superiority of style, scansion or high sentiment—no-one is likely to have my words performed at their wedding or engagement party—but nor am I about to recant. This is because I believe as a matter of fact that Shakespeare was dead wrong in his characterization of Love. Being a theoretical linguist in my day job rather than a poet means that what counts for me as an empirical demonstration may seem abstruse and pedantic to some, but I use the only analytical tools I have to hand. If you don’t care for, or about, arguments of this kind, and simply want to enjoy the sonnet as a expression of a poetic ideal—what love should be, not what it is—read no further, though bear in mind that throughout the sonnet Shakespeare uses is not should be; he is (emphatically now!) making existential claims.

Part I: A little bit of Logic

Before attempting to show why ‘this be error, upon [him] proved…’, it’s worth pointing out that Shakespeare is not just advancing a false claim, he’s sneaky with it too, using the last two lines to insulate this claim from any criticism by means of dirty logic. Indeed, these lines may count as the finest and most creative misuse of material implication in English literature (and which I’ll use in next term’s Meaning & Cognition class). For those unversed (!) in basic logic, material implication refers to the truth or falsity of ‘if…then’ conditional sentences, in which the truth of the consequent (then)-clause necessarily guarantees the truth of the whole conditional, irrespective of the truth of the antecedent clause. By embedding the ‘this be error’ in the antecedent (if)-clause—and then further muddying the waters with implicit or actual negatives (error, never, nor no man ever)—Shakespeare is able to trade on a common misunderstanding of logical properties to scotch any possible contradiction.

The truth table below shows that the only way for a conditional statement of this kind to be false is where the antecedent clause is true and the consequent clause is false, as in the following example:

1.     If it’s raining outside, then a lot more people than usual will be carrying umbrellas.

(1) is true if, as a matter of contingent fact, it is raining outside (A=T) and a lot more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=T). (1) is also true if it’s not raining outside (A=F) and it’s not the case that a lot more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=F). And it is true even if it’s not raining (A=F) and a lot more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=T). It’s only false if the consequent clause is false, but where the antecedent clause is true: i.e., it is raining (A=T), but no more people than usual are carrying umbrellas (C=F) (~q -> ~p).

This is, of course, how the ‘then I’m a Dutchman’ trope works in an argument.* For example, if I say “If Brit-art is Art, then I’m a Dutchman’” then the fact that I am not a Dutchman logically implies (the claim) that Brit-art is not Art (~q -> ~p).

Shakespeare’s ploy is devious because he exploits the fact that in ordinary language (outside of Dutchman contexts) people typically don’t think logically: we can’t help but interpret conditional statements as bi-conditionals, assuming either that both parts of a condition must be true or both parts false. Consider a well-worn statement (in our household at least) such as that in (2):

2.     If you don’t do your homework, we won’t go to Mr. Donuts.

This is correctly interpreted by most children as blackmail, a threat not to go to Mr. Donuts if the homework is not done. But it’s also incorrectly—if conveniently—interpreted by many children—though not Sean, who’s now wise to such tricks!—as an implicit bribe: if you finish your homework, we shall go for donuts. But this doesn’t follow: ~ ((~q -> ~p) -> (~p -> ~q)). I could truthfully utter this even if I had no intention of going to Mr. Donuts under any circumstances: that wouldn’t be nice, of course, but it would be perfectly logical. No-one said logic was fair, or reasonable.

Because of this common interpretive failing, when we read the last two lines of the sonnet, it is natural to infer that the antecedent clause and the consequent clause must agree in truth or falsity (TT, FF): since we know that I never writ, nor no man ever loved is false, we assume that this be error must be false, too. (Note the tricky implicit negative in error: if [this be error] were false, it would mean that this [=the claim] is not false, but true—that Shakespeare is right about love. ) But really Shakespeare is playing us for fools, using a cunning variant of the Dutchman ploy. Because [this be error] is in fact true…

(*Needless to say, this ploy doesn’t work—or works differently—if one happens to be Dutch. Helaas!)

End of Part I

Just in case this all seems too serious, and for want of a better place to put this clip, we should start with some comedy, lest we end up "like the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat...that isn't there!" Enjoy (Click to play)

Part II

Having established the logical point that Shakespeare’s characterization of love could be mistaken, even while he ever writ, it is time to tackle the central challenge of demonstrating how and why Shakespeare is wrong about Love in this sonnet. This discussion will only be interesting and of any value if I can somehow develop a proof, such that it is is more than a matter of subjective opinion, but rather an analytic truth: that is, I will need to show that if my intuitions and analysis are correct, then Shakespeare is wrong by logical necessity.

I aim to achieve this in three stages, moving from a set of general intuitions about what love is, stemming from Julian’s question of some weeks ago, through an exploration of Shakespeare’s metaphors in the sonnet—explaining why they are so unsatisfactory given these intuitions—to a linguistic consideration of ‘Love as concept’ and love as an English predicate, exposing the gap between these two notions. May God forgive me if I end up sounding like a literary critic or—geschweige denn, God forbid—a cognitive linguist: I pretend no talent or experience in either domain. And yet in the words of the sadly under-rated Spandau Ballet—and the justly under-rated Wally Lamb: I know this much is true. I’ll end the piece with a brief discussion of episode two of the second series of Wallander, the Swedish detective show (Prästen—The Priest), which provides the most beautiful, accurate and revealing representation of love, jealousy, death—and what is mistakenly called ‘chemistry’—of any piece of contemporary drama.

First, to Julian's question: "Daddy, do you love me more than Sean?". This affected me at the time, and has bothered me since. The trite and politic answer, which is the one I probably gave (being generally a trite and politic sort of person) is this: "No, don't be silly, I love you both equally, and baby Justin too." Yet the truth is that there can be no answer to this; the question is a non-sequitur. There are two kinds of reason for this, one quantitative, the others qualitative. The dull, quantitative reason—arguments about quantities are rarely of interest to anyone except university and health service administrators, computational linguists, baseball fans, and some autistic children—is that I cannot compare what I cannot measure. Since I don't know how much I love my eldest son, it's impossible to say whether I love my middle child more or less. (The claim that I'm advancing here is that love is never unconditional, not that it is not infinite.) Of course, I could with some difficulty calculate and compare the acts of parental love: since Sean is 5 years older than his brother I must have expressed my love for him on more occasions. But that would yield a meaningless statistic, since—as in the case of language—it is the immanent mental state(s), not the associated behaviors, that are important; (emotional) 'competence, not performance' in linguistics jargon. Incidently, this is another place where Shakespeare is mistaken: the line "Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken" clearly implies that one can measure love ('take his height'). But this is wrong: Love's height is as well unknown as is his worth.

As for the qualitative reasons for the unanswerability of Julian's question, these are considerably more interesting. First off is the observation that my love for Sean is qualitatively different from my love for Julian or Justin, or indeed my love (of any kind for any other human being; be it sexual or filial, parental, vicarious—eros or agape). So, even if I could compare amounts, it would be to compare two different properties; as it were, chocolate ice-cream vs. sushi, waterskiing vs. piano-playing. Only an alien, or other creature devoid of Theory of Mind, would think to ask about such preferences, and yet we frequently ask about love, as though it were the same on each occasion.

This reason, of course, underpins the other glib answer I could have given Julian, and which we too commonly use to wriggle out of tight spots: "I love you both equally, but in different ways." Yet glib though it may be, it expresses a profound truth. For love is different, every time, and each time around; if this were not the case, there might be very little reason to go on living. This is why jealousy and envy in respect of love is so deeply irrational: it makes no sense to be jealous of someone's love for another person, since you could not enjoy that strain of love in any case; it is—as the measurers would say—a 'non-transferable' benefit. This does not mean that jealousy is irrational tout court: for love (of any type) takes time, attention and energy, and all of these are finite resources. Our capacity for loving relationships may be unbounded, but our time is not, and we may rightly resent the person who steals from us our lover's hours. Which brings me rather naturally to the next error in the sonnet: 'Love is Time's fool', as are we all—as Shakespeare himself noted in many other places:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death.

But perhaps the more important question is why love is different every time. To this question, the most obvious answer, which is no doubt partly correct, is that as we are all constituted differently, different physical bodies as it were—so the interactions between us will perforce be different as well. Just as sound-waves produce a different effect when they come into contact with different surfaces, or a ball assumes a different trajectory as a consequence of the smoothness of the cushion, the composition and weight of the golf club, the tension of the racquet strings, the angle of the kicker’s foot—pick your favourite sportinganalogy —so the quality and intensity of our emotional interactions will be determined and individuated by our physical properties; the roughness of our edges, the depths of our respective layers…But this is ballistic love, love as Newtonian physics. Or perhaps, love as inorganic chemistry: the high-school chemistry teacher safeguards his job—and his charges—by knowing which chemical compounds will react in which range of specific conditions; a peck of this, a pinch of that, heated above this or that critical temperature. Love whose outcomes can be replicated, as long as the initial conditions remain the same, as long as the same quantities of chemicals are combined: 'Take a girl like you,’ a guy like me, and the results will be the same each time. Except that they won't of course, for the physics and chemistry both change, as a result of contingent experience. I am not the person I was last week, let alone thirty years ago: my physique and chemistry is altered, mutated, by the history of my interactions, and by the ravages of Time and Fate.

What’s more, even if I had remained constant the nature of my relationship to another person would have changed as a function of the others in my ‘universe of discourse’. A basic and enduring insight of linguistic structuralism is that elements have meaning only in relation to one another, whether one considers word-sense, or semantic roles, or any other notional constituent of the grammatical system. In a language like Japanese, for example, without a separate word for foot, one’s leg (ashi) extends from hip to toe; in a language like English, with such a word foot~feet, the meaning of leg is discretely terminated—docked, as it were—at the ankle. (If we need an expression to cover both leg and foot, we have recourse to technical language—lower limb—but in English no single morpheme can do the job for us). In respect of semantic roles, the interpretation of a subject noun-phrase is immediately transformed from ‘involved participant/experiencer’ to ‘agent’ by the presence of an object in the same clause: cf. Alice burned with righteous indignation/Alice burned the toast. So it is with love—as concept. (I’ll come to the predicate meaning anon) The particular quality of my love for Julian is affected by the presence of his siblings as much as by his character and mine: it is different since he became the middle child, and can never be like that of an only child, as it was for Sean before Julian came along; we are all equally—but disparately—victims of birth order. Likewise, my response to him will be continually adjusted by the myriad interactions with all of the other people I know and care about, not just now—over whatever stretch of proximate time that term extends—but in all my recorded experience.

(If the enduring insight of structuralism was the essential interrelatedness of things, its enduring flaw—which persists in post-structuralist linguistics, including generativism, as well as in all conventional science—is its zealous ahistoricism: the notion that current physical, chemical and biological states form coherent, closed systems, and that everything can be explained by internal, synchronic mechanisms. In the case of love, though—and I suspect, of any construct complex enough to be intellectually interesting, including language—this is tosh, bunkum, a face-spiting nasal amputation (so to speak). A ‘misleading idealization,’ at best. For the particular quality of love I feel for any person is constantly infused and infected by past associations, and remembered sensations: a particular perfume, the after-dinner cigarette, that view from the bridge in the summer of ’83; the recollection of some private ritual. I leave the details to experts—Baudelaire or Proust—but the point should be clear: our feelings and emotional responses are the non-linear sum of our life’s travails. Which is no doubt why it is so damned easy to be young, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time...)

But if only a fraction of this is correct—if love is dynamic, interactive, ever-changing, always contingent, if it is neither (classical) physics nor (inorganic) chemistry, but rather biochemistry—the biochemistry of the specific human at that, not the disembodied gene—then Shakespeare just has to be wrong:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove;
Oh no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken
It is the star to every wandering bark

• If Love did not alter when it alteration finds, it would not be human love: it would be an aberration of Nature, wherein no straight lines are found;
• If Love did not bend with the remover to remove, we should lose contact with those we love everyday;
• If Love were an ever-fixed mark, it would have no place in our metaphysics, for nothing else is so rigid in that domain;
• If Love is the star to every wandering bark, then it is also a wandering star (as all stars are).

And yet, though the metaphors are bankrupt (!), there is something true about the basic sentiment. What Shakespeare is surely right about—what is eternally fascinating—is the constancy of the fact of the love that can exist between two people: the qualities of that relationship may change almost beyond recognition, the individuals themselves may change, still the connection remains, at times tugging, churning, comforting, flowing. It’s just that there are better metaphors for this: for instance: if I am loved by someone, I am paddling in their stream, however I move my feet their water surrounds me; I once said to Sean, ‘I love you as I love my little finger’—I still feel that constant inseparability, even when we fight and argue. There is no rigidity to this type of constancy. Quite the contrary: like the water of the river, it alters where it alteration finds; it can do no other.

In the final part of this piece—should it ever appear—I’ll consider the predicate ‘love,’ rather than the concept. This really might be for linguists only, except that you’ll miss the discussion of Wallander...Which would be a shame. There again, you’d be better off just watching it without commentary.

End of Part II