XV—Love’s Curiosity

Abstract

Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, held at Senate House, University of London, on 24 June 2024 at 6:00 p.m.

The world poured back and forth between their eyes once or twice.

—Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

In a 1959 paper, Iris Murdoch famously defined love as ‘the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’ (1959, p. 51). In elaborating this idea, she drew on the philosopher-mystic Simone Weil to develop a distinctive, normatively thick conception of ‘attention’, which ‘express[es] the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’ (Murdoch 1999b, p., 327).¹ Attentive love, for Murdoch, is something that gets us outside ourselves, directing our gaze outward toward ‘the great surprising variety of the world’ (1999a, 354). Much the same might be said of curiosity.

Indeed, I suspect that there is a certain kind of love that requires curiosity, and a certain kind of curiosity that requires love. In what follows I pursue this suspicion by offering an account of a distinctive form of curiosity—erotic curiosity—and showing how this sort of curiosity can be central to a loving relationship. Thinking about relationships in which curiosity and love intertwine will prompt us to rethink our conceptions of both of love and curiosity. Along the way, it will help us to see what is lacking in Murdochian attentive love.

I

Murdoch developed her conception of love in the context of a sustained attack on some of the foundational assumptions of the moral philosophy of her day. Chief among these was the idea that moral philosophy is essentially concerned with evaluating actions. Attributing this fixation on agency to both Anglophone moral philosophers and French existentialists, Murdoch (1999c, p. 365) mocked what she took to be these traditions’ shared picture of the human being as a ‘Kantian man-god’, too busy imposing his will on the world to stop and look around. As an antidote, Murdoch wanted us to treat vision, rather than action, as the governing metaphor for ethical life. Where the Kantian moral agent thunders about, grasping and manipulating things and allegedly creating value out of thin air by sheer force of will, the Murdochian moral visionary finds a ‘self-forgetful pleasure’ in the ‘sheer alien pointless independent existence’ of a bird glimpsed out the kitchen window (Murdoch 1999c, pp. 369–70).²

Love, Murdoch believed, involves a similar kind of self-forgetting in the face of the independent existence of the beloved. As a creative artist, an erstwhile theist, and a Platonist, she was in the habit of assimilating love to aesthetic appreciation, prayer, and contemplation of the Forms. Asked about her relationship to religion, she once told an interviewer:

I don’t exactly pray to anyone … [instead, what] I mean [by prayer] is an ability to withdraw from immediate concerns and to be quiet and to experience the reality of what’s good in some way. But one is doing this all the time, through beautiful things, through art, through music, and of course very much through other people … (Brans and Murdoch 1985, p. 48, emphasis added)

Such invocations of the quieter, more devotional aspects of moral life are compelling, especially as juxtaposed with Murdoch’s caricature of the Kantian man-god throwing the weight of his ‘fat relentless ego’ around (1999a, p. 342). But they can also sound rather too quiet to make for a satisfying vision of human love—or, for that matter, of ethics. Aesthetic appreciation, prayer, and contemplation of the Forms are all (at least typically, if not essentially) unilateral activities. Analogizing the love of persons to them can risk obscuring the difference between unilateral attention and the more demanding and dynamic modes of intersubjectivity that come into play when the object of your vision can look—and talk—back.

Consider the main passage through which Murdoch’s work has entered contemporary philosophical discussion: an anecdote in which a mother, M, gradually comes to interpret her daughter-in law, D, more favourably over time. Disappointed in her son’s choice, M at first finds D ‘brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile’, and so forth (Murdoch 1999b, p. 312). Equipped with a capacity for ‘careful and just attention’, however, she Murdochianly admonishes herself: ‘I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me look again’ (p. 313, emphasis added). Over time, her vision of D gradually brightens: ‘D is discovered to be not undignified but spontaneous, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful, and so on’ (p. 313).

Murdoch stipulates that M’s outward behaviour toward D remains constant throughout this evolution. She underlines the entirely solitary and unilateral character of this process ‘by supposing that the young couple have emigrated or that D is now dead: the point being to ensure that whatever is in question … happens entirely in M’s mind’ (p. 313). Situating the process of moral change entirely ‘in the head’ facilitates a kind of controlled thought experiment. In so far as the reader agrees that M’s reinterpretation of D constitutes real moral progress, Murdoch will have made her point that many of the cruxes of moral life are located not in our outward actions but in our inner visions and revisions.

In the course of contrasting the inner life with public action in this way, Murdoch sometimes seems to banish any real possibility of interaction from her portrayal of love. It can be hard to imagine what Murdochian love would look like when it is reciprocated. Our ‘just and loving gaze[s]’ (1999b, p. 327) meet—and then what? Anything we do or say risks breaking the contemplative spell. We might find Murdoch’s characterization of attentive love wanting because we were hoping for love to be more robustly intersubjective than that (cf. Nussbaum 2012, p. 152).

Serious inquiry into anything demands close attention, and inquiry into other human beings does indeed call for ‘just and loving’ attention of the sort Murdoch recommends. And yet inquiry usually calls for more than mere attention. When the object of one’s inquiry is another human being, it often calls for reciprocal interaction of just the sort that Murdoch stipulates out of the M and D example. When Socrates and his interlocutors find themselves stuck in aporia, they can keep talking to each other, but they can’t bring their lingering questions to Justice itself. Whereas if the person we love is alive and willing to engage with us, then surely the thing to do is not to ‘retire into [one]self' so as to 'apprehend[] their reality' (Brans and Murdoch 1985, p. 48), but actually to interact with them, involving them in our inquiry into them as they do the same with us. With the contrast case of silent, meditative Murdochian love in the background, let’s turn to thinking about more interactive, more actively inquisitive manifestations of love.

II

Call the process by which, in the context of an ongoing relationship, two or more people inquire into one another interpersonal inquiry. We could approach the subject of interpersonal inquiry in a number of ways. We could ask questions like: How can we respect the privacy of the object of our inquiry? How should we deal with conflicting evidence? Which ostensible sources of insight should we trust, and why? These are interesting questions, but they are not my focus here. Rather than asking about how we should conduct our inquiries into the people we love, I want to ask about how we should conceive of these inquiries. How should we think about the practice of inquiring into one another? What stories should we tell ourselves about its aims and methods?

To do justice to these questions, we first need to understand our motivation to engage in the practice in the first place. Central to my account of interpersonal inquiry is a particular kind of curiosity about another person. Interpersonal inquiry is often the practice of pursuing this kind of curiosity about the people we love. What is the curiosity that makes us want to inquire into one another like? When I am curious about you, what is it that I want?

One familiar answer to this question is that curiosity about another person is a matter of wanting to come to know them. That, at least, seems to be the idea behind the harrowing show tune:

Getting to know you,

Getting to know all about you. …

When I am with you,

Getting to know what to say.

Haven’t you noticed?

Suddenly I’m bright and breezy

Because of all the beautiful and new

Things I’m learning about you

Day by day. (Rodgers and Hammerstein 1981)³

Of course, it is deeply mysterious what it might mean to ‘know’ another person. But suppose we set aside all the philosophical questions about what exactly knowledge of another human being might amount to, and focus instead on the phenomenology of this desire itself—the desire to ‘get to know’, indeed to ‘know all about’ someone.⁴ What might it feel like for that desire to be satisfied?

A good clue that the desire that prompted your inquiries into another human being has been satisfied would be that you have become terminally bored with them. It is sometimes said that you know you are finished with a paper when you cannot even stand to read it anymore. Analogously, perhaps, you know you are finished with a person when you cannot stand—or simply cannot be bothered—to read (interpret, interrogate) them anymore. This would be like a depressing denouement to the show tune. ‘Gotten to know you / Now I know all about you / When I am with you / I know just what to say’: the living person recedes into the distance as your representation of them ceases to change, leaving behind a taxidermized epistemic trophy.

According to the Rodgers and Hammerstein picture, interpersonal inquiry is a search for knowledge, and the lover’s curiosity is a desire for knowledge. That is also how curiosity more generally has been portrayed by epistemologists: as a desire to know. In the context of a philosophical tradition that regards knowledge as the highest epistemic good, it comes naturally to suppose that knowledge must be what the curious person seeks. This knowledge might be propositional—a curious person might wonder when and where human beings first figured out how to make thatched roofs, and what sorts of plants they have been made of at different times and places. It might be a kind of objectual knowledge by acquaintance, as when the curious person wishes to have a thatched roof ‘presented’ or ‘given’ to them so that they can be ‘directly aware’ of it (Russell [1912] 2001, p. 25). It might be knowledge-how, as when a curious person wants to learn techniques for thatching or repairing old thatch. As these examples illustrate, much of our curiosity does indeed seek knowledge of one kind or another—often more than one. Lumping these three types of knowledge together, we can say that many instances of curiosity are knowledge-seeking.

However, as I have argued elsewhere, our understanding of certain cases of passionate curiosity—such as the curiosity that some ecologists have about certain landscapes, some art lovers about certain artworks, and some human beings about certain of their fellow creatures—is ill served by the assumption that curiosity is essentially a search for knowledge.⁵ To understand such cases, we have to turn toward a different sort of curiosity. I call this sort of curiosity ‘erotic curiosity’ because it is, in important ways, analogous to erotic love as described by Plato in the Symposium. Let me briefly note its most important features.

First, erotic curiosity is characteristically prompted by living objects. Objects of inquiry are ‘living’ when, in virtue of their synchronic complexity, diachronic malleability, or both, they can sustain indefinitely many interpretations and reinterpretations, at least where human inquirers are concerned. Living objects paradigmatically include great works of art, cultural and social artefacts and institutions, and creatures and their habitats. Individual human beings are a central case. In so far as insatiable curiosity about people is not only possible but fairly commonplace, it is because—and this will become important again later—people are complicated, and they change.

Second, as the name suggests, erotic curiosity is a desirous state of mind that prompts us to engage with a particular object. But it is not aimed at resolving any particular question about that object, nor is it aimed at attaining any particular epistemic state such as knowledge. Erotic curiosity derives its motivational force not from an antecedently identifiable aim (such as ‘knowing whether p’) but rather from an experience of incompleteness or ‘lack’, an inchoate longing for some sort of communion with its object. An erotically curious inquirer wants not only to be ‘acquainted with’ their object, but to be immersed in it and to explore it in an open-ended way. Such an inquirer regards this process of exploration as enjoyable and valuable in its own right—not only, or even primarily, because of the epistemic states it brings about. For an erotically curious person the process of inquiry is self-replenishing: it deepens and ramifies curiosity rather than exhausting or satisfying it.

Third, like all desire, erotic curiosity feels privative. In desiring something, we represent the world as not yet perfect. Plato emphasizes this aspect of the phenomenology of erotic desire by casting Eros as the son of Penia (‘poverty’), always in need:

As the son of … Penia … he is always poor … he is tough and shriveled and shoeless and homeless, always lying on the dirt without a bed, sleeping at people’s doorsteps and in roadsides under the sky, having his mother’s nature, always living with Need. (Plato 1997b, 203c–d)

But although Eros is rootless, he is not shiftless. For his father is the cunning Poros—‘passage’, ‘pathway’, ‘resource’—a blazer of trails and seeker of ways and means:

[O]n his father’s side he is a schemer after the beautiful and the good; he is brave, impetuous, and intense, an awesome hunter, always weaving snares, resourceful in his pursuit of intelligence, a lover of wisdom through all his life, a genius with enchantments, potions, and clever pleadings. (Plato 1997b, 203d)

This dual heritage makes Eros at once insatiable and unstoppable: he ‘is never completely without resources, nor is he ever rich’ (203e).

Like Eros, the erotically curious person is never fully satisfied.⁶ This makes erotic curiosity distinct from instances of curiosity that have discrete ‘satisfaction conditions’, such as the desire to know who ate the lemon bars you were saving for the bake sale. Once you see your golden retriever guiltily slinking away, his nose covered with powdered sugar, the question is settled and your curiosity disappears. Learning that Fido ate the lemon bars might, in theory, cause you to wonder about canine-human co-evolution. But often, in practice, once the question is answered curiosity simply drops away. Erotic curiosity also leads us to ask and answer questions. But as David Halperin (1985, p. 178) puts it in a beautiful translation of a line from Diotima’s speech in the Symposium, each of these answers ‘still yearns for another question’.

Finally, erotic curiosity is of course compatible with the simultaneous pursuit and acquisition of knowledge of various kinds about one’s object. Knowledge of one’s object will typically accrue over the course of any sustained inquiry. What distinguishes erotic curiosity from knowledge-seeking curiosity is that for the erotically curious inquirer, the accumulation of knowledge is not the point. Knowledge is merely an aid to and by-product of the inquiry; the inquiry itself is the point.⁷

III

Now let us consider how erotic curiosity plays out in the course of interpersonal inquiry, and how it can help us to escape the dead end of the Rodgers and Hammerstein inquisitive scenario. Imagine you meet someone at a party whom you find intriguing enough to go home and google. You read all you can find about them on the internet, wishing there were more. But sooner or later, the encounter recedes into the past. You don’t get to know them, let alone to know all about them—and you don’t get to involve them in your inquiry.

Now imagine a luckier case in which your acquaintance outlasts the party, so that you are able to enlist your intriguing new friend in your inquiry, rather than relying on Google-stalking or solo Murdochian contemplation. What happens next?

As I become curious about you, I will become curious about your thoughts, feelings, and experiences, past and present. Notice that this already amounts to more than curiosity about you, considered in isolation. For you cannot really be considered in isolation; no one can. Each of us is embedded in all sorts of contexts—cultures, social structures, personal relationships, history writ large. If you are Hungarian, then any sufficiently deep curiosity about you will entail curiosity about Hungarian history, a desire to learn Hungarian so that we can communicate in your first language, a desire to visit Hungary and get a feel for the landscapes of your childhood, and so on.

Indeed, the more taken you are with a person, the more deeply your curiosity about them will tend to seep into your curiosity about everything else. Suppose that early in our acquaintance, I learn that you are a great cinephile. I would have been on board with getting more interested in movies because they interest you, and I am interested enough in you to be interested in your interests. But as it happens, I was already interested in movies. So, conveniently, it seems that we have a ‘shared interest’.

But do we really? You and I might go to the movies with entirely different aesthetic desires, hopes, and assumptions. Talking about movies with you, I might find myself at a loss as to how to explain my own reactions, or unable to anticipate or sympathize with yours. Over time, I might find that my own experience of film is comprehensively inflected by my puzzlement about your experience of film. My attention, thoughts, and aesthetic experiences throughout an entire screening might be structured by wondering what you would think of it, anticipating telling you about it afterward, or recalling previous movies we have seen together and what you said about them. In some sufficiently broad and, if necessary, stipulative sense of ‘love’, it seems safe to say that to be that curious about you is to have fallen in love with you. But part of what it is to have fallen in love with you in this broad sense is to have fallen (back) in love with the world—with movies, with Hungary, or whatever—through you. I already loved movies, but now my own relationship to movies has come to seem foreign to me through the foreignness of yours. This estrangement reveals the world as a fresh object of inquiry as I inquire into how you experience it. And since your thoughts about movies will—if you really love movies—never stop changing, and neither will mine, this process is at least potentially never-ending.

Murdoch would want to insist that this was already true in each of our respective individual cases, since we each already loved certain movies enough to see them afresh over and over, in what she calls an 'infinitely extensible work of imaginative understanding' (Murdoch 1959, p. 52). But now there are two of us seeing these movies and talking about them together, each reckoning with what the other sees and says, so that the potential complexity of our thinking multiplies both synchronically as well as over time via the introduction, for each of us, of an additional source of novelty and friction on top of the workings of our own private imaginations and intellects. At first, it may seem like the old world—the world before you—is still there for me, made newly strange by the contrast, as though the world had suddenly doubled in size on the strength of my curiosity about you. Quickly, however, the old world recedes as it gets reconfigured through my attempts to represent it to myself in a way that reckons with the way you are representing it to me. Gradually, through a kind of iterated recursion (as you talk back to me about my interpretation of your interpretation of some movie, and vice versa), it can come to seem that, for each of us, the world has much more than doubled: it has become indefinitely more complex. Before long, it may be hard for either of us to remember what movies—or anything else—looked and felt like before we met. Recognizing the extent of this diachronic hall-of-mirrors effect pushes us toward a kind of holism in which our inquiries into ourselves, into one another, and into the world are all mixed up.

At the climax of Emily Dickinson’s (2010, line 13) description of secluding herself in a locked room to read a love letter, she unseals the envelope in order to ‘Peruse how infinite I am’. It is the unpredictable difference between how her lover sees her and how she sees herself that allows her, at least momentarily, to escape the feeling of finitude—to glimpse a strange and therefore enlarged version of herself that in turn suggests the possibility of further expansion and alteration. The poem emphasizes the narcissistic pleasures of such revelations: the way that the perspective of the other can transform one’s vision of oneself. The sort of simultaneously world- and other-oriented curiosity that I have been describing offers similar intimations of infinity, not only of the self but also of the other and of the world, all at once. When we are curious about one another, the world, as the poet Anne Carson (2010, p. 39) writes, begins to ‘pour back and forth between our eyes’; the more it does so, the larger and more luminous it becomes.

IV

Now that we have a sense of what interpersonal inquiry motivated by erotic curiosity looks like, we can begin to think about its connection to love. Consider the contrast between two modes of interpersonal love that we can see illustrated by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway. On a Wednesday morning in June 1923, Clarissa Dalloway receives an unexpected visit from her old friend Peter Walsh. For both Clarissa and Peter, the reunion stirs up painful and ecstatic memories of another summer, thirty years previously, when Clarissa rejected Peter’s proposal of marriage in favour of the gentle, decent, but rather generic Richard Dalloway.

Woolf’s narration captures each character’s private sense of the ways in which they remain drawn to one another, despite considerable ambivalence. Here is Clarissa, thinking of Peter:

[H]e could be intolerable; he could be impossible; but adorable to walk with on a morning like this. … For they might be parted for hundreds of years, she and Peter; she never wrote a letter and his were dry sticks; but suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say? (Woolf 1992, p. 38)

And here is Peter, thinking of Clarissa:

No, no, no! He was not in love with her any more! He only felt … unable to get away from the thought of her; she kept coming back and back like a sleeper jolting against him in a railway carriage; which was not being in love, of course; it was thinking of her, criticising her, starting again, after thirty years, trying to explain her. (Woolf 1992, p. 89)

Of course, despite his protestations, Peter is still in love with Clarissa, and vice versa—at least in the broad sense of love invoked above in our discussion of the curious moviegoers. The two of them experience this love largely through, or perhaps even as, curiosity. Even when Clarissa hasn’t seen Peter for what feels like ‘hundreds of years’, he can suddenly seem to ‘come over her’ unbidden. He arrives not in the form of a memory but in the form of a question: ‘If he were with me now what would he say?’ Meanwhile, when the thought of Clarissa ‘jolt[s] against’ Peter like a sleeper in a railway carriage, what it keeps prompting him to do, after thirty years, is not simply to recall her but to begin again trying to explain her.

What accounts for the longevity of this mutual curiosity? Woolf suggests that it has something to do with the way Clarissa and Peter handle their frustration at the impossibility of full mutual knowledge. Peter recalls that in their youth,

Clarissa had a theory … It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction; not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself everywhere; not ‘here, here, here’; and she tapped the back of the seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or barns. (Woolf 1992, p. 145)

It is worth dwelling on the details of this passage. The young Clarissa here traces her sense of ‘not knowing people’ and ‘not being known’ to how much time she and her friends have to spend apart. But of course, although absence can exacerbate feelings of not knowing and not being known, human embodiment places constraints on the possibility of mutual knowledge even in the limit case of dual-consciousness conjoined twins. Notoriously, however much I may ‘feel your pain’, so long as we have distinct nervous systems, I will never feel it in quite the same way as you do. Clarissa’s feeling that it is ‘unsatisfactory … how little one knows people’ is available to any of us at any time, however much we see of each other.

How do Clarissa’s remarks address this dissatisfaction? Recall the way I was thinking about you at the movies. We noted that my curiosity about you can be pursued even in your absence by allowing it to expand outward, beyond the confines of our respective psyches and into the larger world. Clarissa makes a similar point. She imagines a diffuse picture of the self, according to which she is not located ‘here, here, here’—we can picture her tapping out a space-time-worm theory of the self on the bus seat, insisting that she is not fully located here₁ at t₁, here₂ at t₂—but ‘everywhere’, so that ‘to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places’. This includes not only people Clarissa herself loves and places she has actually haunted but even ‘odd affinities’ that someone else might notice between Clarissa and ‘some woman in the street’ whom she has never met.

A flatfooted reading of Clarissa’s remarks here would suggest that her solution to the impossibility of full or even ‘satisfactory’ knowledge of the beloved is a kind of knowledge by proxy. You may be far away, literally or figuratively, but in your absence I can content myself with learning about your favourite trees and barns. But Peter finds a different and more interesting consolation in Clarissa’s theory:

Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years her theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful as their actual meetings had been … the effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain—the actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in the most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she had come to him; on board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things (so Sally Seton, generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of him when she saw blue hydrangeas). She had influenced him more than any person he had ever known. (Woolf 1992, pp. 145–6)

Notice that in Peter’s account of how Clarissa’s theory ‘works’, talk of knowledge drops out altogether. It is replaced by talk of influence—the ‘immeasurable’, ‘myster[ious]’ ‘effect’ of Clarissa, who has ‘influenced [Peter] more than any person he had ever known’—as well as of a sort of multimodal perceptual, affective, and intellectual salience—‘the whole feel of it and understanding’ that ‘flowers out’ in the ‘most unlikely places’.

The combination of enduring salience and pervasive, albeit elusive, influence that Peter evokes is like the effect of an early favourite author on a philosopher’s subsequent intellectual life. It is not as though you fall in love with Either/Or as a teenager, work hard to gain knowledge of the correct interpretation of the text, and then carry that knowledge around so as to apply it in your subsequent thinking. Instead, you try to understand Either/Or, fail, try again, fail again, and move on to other things. And yet you occasionally find yourself reminded of passages from Either/Or while reading or thinking about something else; these other texts and questions might come to look different in light of Either/Or, or vice versa. It is often only in distant retrospect (if ever) that you can see the imprint of Either/Or on your subsequent thinking.

The sense in which you have ‘learned from’ Either/Or is not that you have gleaned something from it and stowed it away securely in your belief box. What your encounter with Either/Or has given you is not a body of knowledge about it but a whole set of habits of thinking of (or with) it, inquiring into it, and relating it to everything else—letting it ‘flower out, open, and shed its scent’ from time to time. To be sure, you needed to have a certain amount of knowledge under your belt in order to acquire that habit in the first place, and the habit in turn has led you to acquire more knowledge in the meantime. But knowledge accumulation was never the point. The point was, rather, to live a life infused by Either/Or—to think, feel, notice, remember, appreciate, and act in ways that would not have been possible without Either/Or.

The emphasis Clarissa places on inquisitive activity over knowledge acquisition explains how her theory of the self can serve at once as a consolation for, and as an explanation of, her dissatisfaction at not knowing people. The explanation goes like this: anyone about whom we feel dissatisfied in this way will be someone about whom we are curious. But the more curious we are, the more inevitable it is that our curiosity will never be fully satisfied. Among other reasons, this is because curiosity about another person naturally extends beyond and through them to the wider world—to trees, barns, and men behind counters. So, quite apart from any general problem of other minds, the very depth and expansiveness of the lover’s curiosity militates against their ever coming to feel that that curiosity has been exhausted.

Meanwhile, Clarissa’s theory of the self serves as a consolation because, at the end of the day, she is convinced that having the desire to explain someone jolt up against you like a sleeper in a railway carriage is preferable to the scenario in which you have no such desire because you take yourself already to have figured them out. Both Clarissa and Peter take themselves to be better off in virtue of Clarissa’s having the question ‘suddenly come over her’, ‘If he were with me now what would he say?’ than they would be if, science-fictionally, she could simply know the answer to that question. The salience of the question gives Clarissa something better than knowledge: it structures, enlivens, and enlarges her life. The curiosity with which Clarissa and Peter approach one another sustains and complicates their everyday inquiries rather than resolving them. It enriches them not by adding to their store of information but by animating and infusing their whole experience of the world.

V

Clarissa aspires to approach everyone in the way she approaches Peter, treating inquisitive attention and appreciation as preferable to taxonomizing and knowledge-banking. She insists that:

[s]he would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that … She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that. (Woolf 1992, pp. 38–9)

But Clarissa does not in fact succeed in refraining from the sort of summative characterization of people that she forswears here. In some of her relationships, most notably her marriage, she does indeed succumb to the temptation to say that ‘they are this’ or ‘they are that’.

Clarissa’s attitude toward her husband Richard, though affectionate, has an undertone of gratified condescension that is incompatible with erotic curiosity:

He returned with a pillow and a quilt. ‘An hour’s complete rest after luncheon’, he said. And he went. How like him! He would go on saying ‘An hour’s complete rest after luncheon’ to the end of time, because a doctor had ordered it once. It was like him to take what doctors said literally; part of his adorable, divine simplicity … (Woolf 1992, p. 121)

Clarissa feels she has Richard figured out to her satisfaction. This is not to say that she feels she knows him through and through—indeed, as we will see, she would not wish to. The point is that she feels she knows him well enough to leave well enough alone. Whereas curiosity is central to Clarissa’s love for Peter, if Clarissa and Richard love each other—and I am happy to grant for the sake of argument that they do—they love in a way that is compatible with an almost complete absence of mutual curiosity.

Clarissa is conscious of this lack of curiosity, but presents it as a matter of preserving a private psychic sphere for each of them in what might otherwise become a stifling domestic coexistence:

[T]here is a dignity in people, a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect … for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one’s husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s self-respect—something, after all, priceless. (Woolf 1992, p. 121)

And yet one suspects that part of Clarissa’s reason for choosing the anodyne Richard over Peter in the first place, given these well-founded fears of loss of independence in marriage, was that it would be easy for the two of them in particular to maintain such a ‘gulf’, if only because neither would be overly tempted to bridge it. Under the circumstances, and given what she (rightly or wrongly) takes for granted as necessary for a good life, marrying someone who cannot keep up with her intellectually or emotionally has, at least, allowed her to preserve a measure of solitude within a claustrophobic role.

The above characterization of Clarissa and Richard’s relationship is, of course, tendentious. A more flattering way to describe it is not in terms of the absence of mutual curiosity but in terms of the ballasting presence of deep mutual knowledge. Of course, the idea of knowledge of persons is sufficiently mysterious that it is unclear what precisely it might mean for two people to ‘know’ one another in any philosophically weighty sense.⁸ But surely there are plenty of flat-footed, everyday senses in which Richard and Clarissa know each other very well. They have plenty of propositional knowledge (each probably knows exactly how many lumps of sugar the other takes with their tea) as well as knowledge-how (each probably knows exactly how best to persuade the other to take an hour’s nap after luncheon). And if there is anything that a decades-long marriage ensures, it is objectual knowledge by acquaintance. Mutual knowledge of these kinds will accrue over time in any relationship, regardless of how interpersonal inquiry is understood and practiced.

I do not mean to deny the many innocent and wholesome gratifications that such a well-stocked epistemic pantry can afford. What I want to raise ethical concerns about is the habit of conceiving of our inquiries into one another in terms of stocking the pantry. That is how Clarissa and Richard think about their epistemic relations. Once upon a time, they each actively sought knowledge of the other. Now they can rest, having found it—at any rate, having found as much as they ever sought.⁹ This sense of a job well and fully done leaves Clarissa feeling much more secure in her relationship to Richard than she does in any of her other relationships. That is in part because her representations of Richard are themselves secure: internally coherent and diachronically stable.

Plato dramatizes our craving for this sort of secure epistemic prosperity in the Meno, where Socrates illustrates the superiority of knowledge to mere true belief by comparing the former to a well-secured statue of Daedalus and the latter to a ‘runaway slave’:

To acquire an untied work of Daedalus is not worth much, like acquiring a runaway slave, for it does not remain, but it is worth much if tied down, for his works are very beautiful. What am I thinking of when I say this? True opinions. For true opinions, as long as they remain, are a fine thing and all they do is good, but they are not willing to remain long, and they escape from a man’s mind, so that they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. … After they are tied down, in the first place they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. That is why knowledge is prized higher than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down. (Plato 1997a, 97d–98a)

It is this desire for epistemic security that motivates Plato’s posit of the Forms: unified, changeless entities that would underlie the world’s apparent flux and lend themselves to correspondingly stable and coherent theoretical representations. Although Richard is rather less dazzling than the Form of the Good, Clarissa’s epistemic approach to him yields some of the same psychic benefits.

Of course, Clarissa and Richard are not alone here. The idea that we know one another plays an important protective psychic role for most of us. It plays this role whether it is true or false, and whatever it might mean. In this way, it is much like the idea that we know ourselves. ‘I know myself well enough by now’, ‘I know him better than that’: no one knows what these phrases mean. This does not diminish their efficacy as charms to ward off doubt and dread. If I know myself now, and I know you now, and you know yourself now, and you know me now, then so long as we both stay the same over time, we can be confident that we will always be and do for each other what we are and do for each other now. This is a deeply tempting promise of safety and repose. Thinking of our relationships in terms of mutual knowledge helps us to feel that these relationships, and the much-needed love, care, and recognition they bring, have the stability and security that we associate with knowledge as opposed to mere belief.

When it comes to our representations of human beings, however, Socrates’ comparison of knowledge to a tied-down statue as against true belief’s ‘runaway slave’ becomes rather alarming. We should not try to master the people we love by tying them down; we should want, for ourselves and for one another, to be unmasterable, dynamic, creative, spontaneous: in a word, free.¹⁰ When our curiosity about one another ‘prize[s] [knowledge] higher than correct opinion’, we risk treating not just our representations of people but the people themselves as potential fugitives whose value depends on the extent to which they can be ‘tied down’. We do not have to worry about imposing an oppressively Procrustean order on the Form of the Good by theorizing about it; the Form of the Good can take care of itself. But unlike the Forms, other human beings can change—and cease to change—in response to our representations of them.

Luckily, the ossifying gaze of the knowledge-seeker can never be entirely self-fulfilling: human beings are indeed malleable, whether we like to admit it or not. But we can be more or less so. When Richard and Clarissa met, Richard was already just the sort of person—eminently sensible, firmly set in his ways—who best lends himself to a coherent and stable representation. Part of why Clarissa’s representation of Richard, like the tied-down statues of Daedalus, is able to ‘remain in place’ so snugly is that Richard himself is temperamentally inclined to remain in place. And yet another part of the story is surely that Clarissa values Richard’s predictability, ‘his adorable, divine simplicity’, and that Richard is aware of this. In light of such observer effects, we have to recognize that approaching people with knowledge-seeking curiosity involves a danger of discouraging change: holding our loved ones themselves ‘in place’ in the name of the diachronic stability of our representations of them. It also involves a danger of suppressing our loved ones’ complexity, ambiguity, and internal conflict in the name of the synchronic coherence of our representations of them. As Wiliam James (2002, p. 26) notes, ‘the theorizing mind tends always to the oversimplification of its materials’. When the ‘material’ that we oversimplify is a human being who is responsive to how she is represented, she may feel pressured to resolve her own ambivalence so as to make herself more coherently representable.

Whether we ought to approach people with knowledge-seeking or with erotic curiosity depends, in part, on how stable and consistent we want to insist that they be—in other words, on how much change and ambivalence we want to allow to ourselves and to one another. This in turn depends on how we think about the self. If we want to blunt the acquisitive edge of knowledge-seeking curiosity and allow erotic curiosity to flourish, we will have to learn to recognize and embrace the full extent of human malleability and intrapsychic conflict.¹¹ By the same token, when we approach one another with erotic curiosity rather than with a desire for knowledge, we can more easily acknowledge and allow ourselves and one another to be ambivalent and changeable. For what we are saying to one another then is not ‘I know you, and I love you just the way you are’ but rather ‘I love you, and I can’t wait to see what you will become’.¹²

Woolf herself was very much alive to this feedback loop between our conceptions of interpersonal inquiry and what Murdoch liked to call our ‘soul-pictures’: our ‘value-rich conceptions’ of selfhood (Russell 2022, p. 37; see also Russell 2024). Clarissa and Peter are portrayed as seeing both themselves and one another as creatures in flux, ‘making it up’ (Woolf 1992, pp. 36, 72) as they go along in a world of others who are doing the same. The ‘soul’ or the ‘self’, for them, is a thing that ‘fishlike inhabits deep seas and plies among obscurities threading her way between the boles of giant weeds, over sun-flickered spaces and on and on into gloom’ and yet ‘suddenly … shoots to the surface and sports on the wind-wrinkled waves; that is, has a positive need to brush, scrape, kindle herself’ through contact with others (p. 151).¹³ For each of them, the possibility of this ‘kindling’ depends on approaching life in a spirit of imaginative improvisation—on thinking both of both the world and the self as needing to be ‘creat[ed] every moment afresh’ (Woolf 1992, p. 36). Embracing this joyfully Protean, improvisatory view of the self allows Clarissa and Peter to continue to ‘lack’ each other, however much everyday mutual knowledge they might accrue.

Does that mean that Clarissa and Peter have solved, in practice, the theoretical problem we began with—the question of how to conceive of love as more interactive than mere Murdochian attention? Should we look to their relationship, as Woolf portrays it, as an ideal model of the right kind of curiosity, or the best kind of love?

Of course not. Virginia Woolf did not create moral paragons or couples destined to live happily ever after. Her characters instead ‘display the sort of murkiness and complexity which is the rule, not the exception, in life, and especially in the part of life interesting to us as moral philosophers’ (Arpaly 2003, p. 30). Moreover, the circumstances of Peter and Clarissa’s relationship rule out the possibility of regarding it as an exemplary case of love. The two go years without seeing each other, and in the meantime their letters are ‘dry sticks’. We are meant to wonder whether their curiosity is artificially sustained by distance—in other words, by the absence of the very sort of actively inquisitive reciprocity that we began by looking for. If they had married, would their relationship now be as dead as Clarissa’s relationship with Richard is?

Probably. Indeed, Clarissa’s marriage to Richard is likely more successful than a marriage to Peter would have been. But this may say as much about the limitations of marriage in general—at least as it was understood in London in 1923—as it does about the virtues of Clarissa’s relationship with Richard in particular. Dead though that relationship may be, it is also part of what keeps Clarissa alive, literally speaking. Clarissa may well be right that she ‘must have perished’ ‘quite often if Richard had not been there reading the Times, so that she could crouch like a bird and gradually revive, send roaring up that immeasurable delight, rubbing stick to stick, one thing with another’ (Woolf 1992, p. 169). But there is a difference between what keeps us alive and what makes our lives worth living. The two will coincide for you more than they do for Clarissa if the people you rely on make you feel alive rather than merely keeping you on psychic life support. In a different cultural context, Clarissa might have felt more at liberty to marry Peter instead, or Sally Seton, or to avoid marriage altogether and arrange her life and her loving otherwise.

Platonic Eros depends on a lack of possession: on ‘poverty’. Eros sleeps in gutters under the stars. The institutions of intimacy in which Clarissa, Peter and Richard are embedded—monogamous marriage, the nuclear family defensively ensconced in its property—aspire, by contrast, to comfort, security and stability. Of course, these institutions often fail to deliver what it says on the tin. But even when they do, they often leave us dependent on a small handful of people for love, recognition and care. When our psychic and material sustenance depend too wholly on too few individuals—a spouse, parents, children, a sibling or two—it can be hard even to countenance, let alone to rejoice in, those people’s capacity for ambivalence and transformation, or our own. A lot would likely change about our ways of loving and inquiring if we had more time to enjoy our lives, if relations of friendship and community beyond the couple and the family played a larger role in them, and if love were untethered from economic necessity.¹⁴ So, the extent to which we can give up on the security of mutual knowledge (or the imagined security of a fantasy of mutual knowledge) may depend on other forms and sources of security.

As it stands, many of us lack the backdrop of psychosocial abundance—the sense of having time, care, affection, and vitality to spare—against which it becomes possible to face the ‘lack’ that is at the heart of both curiosity and love. So it should be no surprise that, at present, many of us associate love with a desire to know and be known, to possess and be possessed. If we want our desire to be surprised and remade by one another to prevail more often over our fear of change and of the unknown, our ways of living together may themselves have to change. Woolf is pointing toward real human possibilities—toward more changeable forms of selfhood and more curious forms of love. These are possibilities that our current conceptions of love, inquiry and the self tend to obscure. At the same time, she is illustrating some of the obstacles, political and economic as well as cultural, that stand in the way of our realizing those possibilities. What forms of love, curiosity and selfhood might a different way of life open up to us? To find out, we would have to make like Eros and want more.¹⁵

References

Footnotes