People have names for the same reason that books and songs have titles. We like to be able to call it something. Even though, as Sartre notes in Nausea, “Things are divorced from their names.”

Names of things don’t really make sense. Form doesn’t match function; the physical thing isn’t represented in the sound. Except maybe in the case of onomatopoeias.

Nietzsche writes in Zarathustra:

“My brother, when thou hast a virtue, and it is thine own virtue, thou hast it in common with no one. To be sure, thou wouldst call it by name and caress it; thou wouldst pull its ears and amuse thyself with it. And lo! Then hast thou its name in common with the people, and hast become one of the people and the herd with thy virtue! Better for thee to say: ‘Ineffable is it, and nameless, that which is pain and sweetness to my soul, and also the hunger of my bowels.’ Let thy virtue be too high for the familiarity of names, and if thou must speak of it, be not ashamed to stammer about it.”

There seems to be a hierarchy of meaning from names: highest, there is the kind where we do not name it at all—this is what Nietzsche recommends. In the middle, is a diversity of names that allow for some differentiation—this we do with books and people. We say this book is non-fiction and its subject is automobiles; that person is a mechanic and a deist. We say as if this nomenclature is exhaustively and perfectly descriptive; though it comes closer than the lowest, it is not perfect. And the lowest, when we have one name for a diverse thing.

We have one name for love, as if it were describing one thing. We bring our “love” to the herd as if we had it in common with them. We say, I am in love! As if it means the same thing. And we set parameters, guidelines and expectations that are the averages of other loves, most usually those loves proximal to our time and place.

So too with justice. Justice is a general concept, but surely its applications are ad hoc. Not to mention that there are competing justice models and we have not agreed on just one. So that it is most appropriate when someone says, “That is just!” The most appropriate response is: “What exactly do you mean by justice?”

Surely love and justice are general concepts with Forms of which there are many different conceptions. Just as I am, and my identity is, something like a Form with many different renderings in reality.

Let I and love be ineffable. Caress it and pull its ears!