Who is my neighbor?: personalism and the foundations of human rights

10. The Two Loves

10. THE TWO LOVES W ojtyla divides all free human action into using (incorporating other realities into one’s own ends) and loving (affirming others as an end in themselves). He furthermore defines love as treating others as an end and never as a mere means. The truth of these two claims is not immediately self-evident. If the psychological sciences have taught us anything, it is that human behavior is an extremely complex and knotty business. Can all transitive human action really be broken into use and love? Second, in the many definitions of love on the market, treating others as an end seldom appears. By “love” some mean passion, others friendship, and others romantic attachment, among many other possible definitions. C. S. Lewis famously wrote about “four loves” in a work by that title and none was of affirming others as an end in themselves.1 Is Wojtyla’s definition of love defensible? How do these claims stand up, for instance, to a Thomistic understanding of love and of human action? In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas treats of love first as a passion and second as a virtue (charity).2 As a passion, the object of love is the good, and thus love—properly speaking—pertains to the concupiscible appetite (desire).3 Just as the appetite exists on different levels (natural ap-                           . C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Harper Collins, ). . See S. Th., I-II, –; II-II, –. Thomas defines charity as friendship with God (and love of neighbor for God’s sake) and repeats his distinction between love of concupiscence and love of friendship, defining the virtue of charity as a love of the second type. . Thomas says that “good causes, in the appetitive power, a certain inclination, aptitude or connaturalness in respect of good: and this belongs to the passion of ‘love’” (ibid., I-II, , ). Love is a passion in the proper sense when we are speaking of the natural or sensitive appetites; it is called a passion in a broader sense of the term when referring to the will (see ibid., I-II, , ).  petite, sensitive appetite, intellectual appetite), so there are different loves corresponding to these appetites (natural love, sensitive love, intellectual or rational love). In each case, love is the principal movement toward the end loved, though free will is operative only on the level of intellectual love, which is the movement of the intellectual appetite or will. The appetite is moved by the good, first as complacency (attraction), then as desire (movement toward), and finally by joy (resting in the good).4 In Love and Responsibility, Wojtyla follows this latter tripartite division, to wit: love as attraction (amor complacentiae), as desire (amor concupiscentiae ), and as goodwill (amor benevolentiae).5 These three elements correspond not to different types of love but to moments or dimensions of love. Wojtyla asserts that while the first two elements are indeed charac-                     . “Prima ergo immutatio appetitus ab appetibili vocatur amor, qui nihil est aliud quam complacentia appetibilis; et ex hac complacentia sequitur motus in appetibile, qui est desiderium ; et ultimo quies, quae est gaudium” (ibid., I-II, , ). Elsewhere Thomas distinguishes these three as separate passions. Love is the passion operated on the soul by a good, desire is produced by a good not yet possessed, and joy is produced in the soul by resting in a good obtained (see ibid., I-II, , ). . See Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility, –. This division roughly follows Thomas’s distinction of love according to its presence or absence and kind. For instance, when speaking of the mutual indwelling caused by love, Thomas writes that “the object loved is said to be in the lover, inasmuch as it is in his affections, by a kind of complacency (complacentiam): causing him either to take pleasure in it, or in its good, when present; or, in the absence of the object loved, by his longing, to tend towards it with the love of concupiscence (amorem concupiscentiae ), or towards the good that he wills to the beloved, with the love of friendship (amorem amicitiae )” (S. Th., I-II, , ). On attraction, Wojtyla states, for example, that it “is of the essence of love and in some sense is indeed love, although love is not merely attraction” (Love and Responsibility , ). It should noted here that Wojtyla sees this attraction, or “liking,” to go beyond the emotional reaction to a perceived good proper to the passions. He refers to...