For a long time now, I have sought to give myself a precise definition of self-love, of La Rochefoucauld’s amour propre — a word utterly absent from modern English quite simply because its sense is so plainly opposed to the modern worldview of an innately good human nature that one could never use it and be understood. While reading The Possibility Of An Island this morning, it occured to me that the word is quite simple to define if one simply keeps in mind that the definition of love to be used is La Rochefoucauld’s, and not the average man’s — a definition elucidated painfully well by that passage from The Portrait Of Dorian Gray that I understand so well and that I hate knowing I understand so well.
There is always something ridiculous about the emotions of people whom one has ceased to love. Sibyl Vane seemed to him to be absurdly melodramatic.1
For La Rochefoucauld, to love means to be a state when one sees things as they are manifestly not, when one forgives what one should rightly condemn, when one understands and sympathizes with what is actually madness and delusion, when one values one person more highly than ten others for no reason other than that one feels this is proper. Love disguises the truth that we are all in fact absurdly melodramatic: in love, for a while, one is given a brief respite and forgets this and can thus live happily and without contempt for at least one person — one can think that here something is important, that here is something that is not mere vanity and vexation of spirit. Self-love is merely this sort of love directed towards oneself: it is thus self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement through and through. And this sense is precisely how the word is defined contextually by taking La Rochefoucauld’s maxims as a whole: for instance, the maxim that “self-love is the greatest of all flatterers.”
It is only fitting that this moment of clarity about La Rochefoucauld came from reading Houellebecq as the two French moralists are bound to each other perhaps more than to anyone else by their unique mixture of brutally disillusioned, negative portrayals of love with a simple faith in a transcendental, idealized form of true love. Odd as it is, it is nevertheless a view I find myself sharing instinctively, though I am unsure if it is actually true. At present all I can say is that it seems to me that love is indeed often quite a destructive and hurtful force, but a world without love is even worse and filled with more destruction and violence. It seems to me that the choice is between caring for no one and caring for at least one person; caring for everyone is an impossibility.
- Oscar Wilde : The Portrait Of Dorian Gray : Chapter 7↩