Santayana on Love. Love has a natural, animal, instinctive, sexual, and biological basis and, on the other hand, it has some ideal object (RS 8), which means that someone we love, apart from being desired and needed, is also seen as one embodying some impersonal ideal or ideals that we, the loving persons, long for and prize, the beautiful for example. Hence, someone we love is desired and, at the same time, idealized in our imagination: the loving person imposes upon the loved person some features (one or many) that is believed to be objective (truly belonging to that loved person), perfect, and, perhaps, long-lasting, and these are the essential factors that make us say that we love. Hence, a role of imagination; actually, Santayana, in the chapter “Love” of Reason in Society, narrows down the term ‘love’ to “imaginative passion, to being in love” (RS 7). The role of imagination in love is potentially hugely important because the lover can, if s/he is able to, use his/her imagination to approach the lover as if the lover were herself/himself the ideal (Singer 2009, 36). In other words, we do not love other people as such (although we desire them as such), but rather we love the ideal features they possess or seem to possess; love is an appreciation of ideals, not a relationship between loving persons (Madigan 2011). However, these ideals, are hardly ever fulfilled (IPR 126), hence love is hardly ever to be consumed in such a way as desire can be, especially sexual union. Imagination can be unlimitedly developed: “To possess things and persons in idea is the only pure good to be got out of them; to possess them physically or legally is a burden and a snare (PP 428).”

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