Tuesday 14 February 2012 (St. Valentine's Day)

The passion appears to every body, but the man who feels it, entirely disproportioned to the value of the object; and love, though it is pardoned in a certain age because we know it is natural, is always laughed at, because we cannot enter into it.

On this Saint Valentine’s Day I thought it would be enlightening to see what some moral philosophers have had to say on the topic of romantic love. This quotation from Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is more amusing than enlightening as Smith seems to be genuinely unable to “sympathize” with one person’s romantic love for another. He says that a third party can understand another person feeling pain or hunger because we have had those same feelings ourselves, but when it comes to understanding why an individual feels love for a SPECIFIC other person then this same third party (namely himself) is mystified. Smith calls the feeling “disproportioned to the value of the object”, “ridiculous”, and to be “laughed at” as something rather immature. He concludes, rather uncharitably, “though a lover may be good company to his mistress, he is so to nobody else.” Perhaps we would be better off reading some of Petrach’s or Shakespeare’s poetry. </quote/357>