The Paradox of Possessive Love
Sartre, Freedom, and The Ethics of Sexual Ownership
In the passages of the dense, seemingly verbose, yet, powerfully descriptive work Being and Nothingness, 20th-century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre issued a thinly-veiled warning against humans who might embark on possessive love — that it will simply never fulfill its function. Possessive love, thought Sartre, is based upon a contradiction, one where the love object is simultaneously glorified and dehumanized, bestowed with extraordinary power (which is then demanded that it perform the function of being the source of the extraordinary power), yet, reduced to a highly controlled object-thing, something incapable of seemingly basic and, in Sartre’s view, inextricable parts of the human experience, like choice and freedom. Why do lovers seek to control one another? While psychology has issued a litany of answers to this question, philosophy has a few that I find a bit more substantial, and, as Sartre thought, I too agree that possessive love is built upon a contradiction.
Love, throughout the entire expanse of human agricultural history, as all-too-often been explained as a possession and a concept of ownership, with terms that suggest that we take one another as lovers, rather than attracting one another. It’s quite obvious that this is because wherever people need to compete for…
