“Love one another!”

“Love one another!” is the moral injunction Dr Cottard invokes and immediately belittles during a conversation about the endurance of Socrates’s reputation. The phrase’s familiar appeal to mutual care becomes, in his skeptical speech, a test case for the difference between an attractive maxim and knowledge grounded in demonstrable work.

The Phrase in Cottard’s Argument

Cottard sets the injunction beside Socrates’s reported words, “Gn thi seauton,” and argues that memorable sayings have preserved their speakers’ names without proving the depth of their philosophy. He calls Socrates’s thought slight and contrasts it with the work of Charcot and other researchers, whose findings about the pupillary reflex as a syndrome of general paralysis are, in his view, far more remarkable and better founded, yet nearly forgotten.

The appeal to love follows the same skeptical pattern. Cottard invokes Jesus Christ only to dismiss the injunction as pretty, treating its moral force as a pleasing formula rather than an argument. His speech thus juxtaposes two sayings associated with revered teachers and subjects both to his demand for practical or intellectual substance.

Irony and Social Reception

The line is delivered amid a dinner-table exchange in which other people register the force of Cottard’s irreverence. After his earlier pun has drawn a subtle smile from Princess Sherbatoff, Brichot calls Socrates the patron saint of the brotherhood; Cottard’s alarmed glance toward Charlus shows that this scholarly phrase may carry social implications beyond the joke. Cottard then extends his skepticism from philosophy to religion and morality.

Mme Cottard’s plea, “My dear,” interrupts the speech, but Cottard answers by generalizing that women are neurotic. The sequence places the injunction’s ethic of mutual care beside his own dismissive treatment of his wife. Its irony arises from the scene’s contrast: Cottard calls the maxim pretty, while his conduct in the conversation offers little evidence of the tenderness it recommends.