Enchantment and Surrender
Further Insights from José Ortega y Gasset
Recently over lunch with a dear friend, we got to talking about the fact that many people simply aren’t very good at being friends. Given our modern obsession with technique, we’re likely to say that such people lack “friendship skills” and that maybe a paid seminar or a few life hacks will solve the problem; however, I think there’s much more going on here, because it seems to me that many folks are constitutionally incapable of freehearted giving, investing in people, or cultivating what Aristotle called character friendship. Similarly, José Ortega y Gasset (in his book On Love) distinguishes romantic love as the “prototype and summit of all eroticisms” from lesser forms such as affection and passion, claiming that “love is an infrequent occurrence, a sentiment which only certain souls can hope to experience” and that “falling in love is a marvelous talent which some creatures possess, like the gift of composing verses, the spirit of sacrifice, melodic inspiration, personal bravery” and such. He writes:
Since love is the most delicate and total act of the soul, it will reflect the state and nature of the soul. The characteristics of the person in love must be attributed to love itself. If the individual is not sensitive, how can his love be sentient? If he is not profound, how can his love be deep? As one is, so is his love. For this reason, we can find in love the most decisive symptom of what a person is.
Ortega locates the essence of love and friendship in surrender, i.e., in yielding yourself up to the beloved or, as he puts it, uprooting your vital depths and transplanting them into the soil of another soul. According to Ortega, in parental love this uprooting happens through instinct and in friendship it happens through a clear decision of the will (although I am not so sure: Montaigne’s essay on friendship provides evidence to the contrary), whereas in romantic love “the fundamental surrender is not carried out on the plane of will, but occurs more deeply within the person” through a kind of irresistible influence - which, not shying away from its magical overtones, he calls enchantment.
For Ortega, this “surrender due to enchantment” is unwilled precisely because it is irresistible; although a person can, through an act of will and in self-defense against the beloved, attempt to resist this surrender, success in that endeavor only shows that the person never really loved from the depths in the first place.
Surrender sure sounds scary, doesn’t it? It might even be positively unfashionable in this age of narcissism and looking out for number one. While talking with another dear friend the other day (I have a lot of dear friends!), I mentioned a line from Joni Mitchell’s song “Both Sides, Now”: “don’t give yourself away”, which perfectly encapsulates the attitude that you’d have to be a sucker to place your heart in someone else’s hands. Yet I’m an incurable romantic (as I think Joni might have been when she wrote that song), so I can’t agree with the sentiment. To me, the solution is to give yourself away, but to make sure that the recipient is a beautifully good person who cares about you and has your best interests at heart. Unfortunately that’s easier said than done! And even if the gods smile on you as they’ve done on me, it still takes courage to brave the impassioned whirlwind and the inevitability of pain and loss. No one ever said that reaching the heights of human possibility was easy...
