Thursday 2/15

Thursday 2/15

Contemporary Views on Love III

Readings

Texts

Quiz Questions

  • Why does Frankfurt conclude that "even quite reasonable and respectable people find that other things may sometimes mean more to them, and make stronger claims upon them, than either morality or themselves"?
  • Why does Frankfurt conclude no purely rational justification for how to order our lives is possible?
  • What is the difference between caring and wanting for Frankfurt?

Synopsis

Today we revisited our readings from last time. After class, Julissa and Thomas pointed out that they used the above reading questions to prepare for the quiz, yet I unthinkingly asked a reading quiz question from last time. Fair enough. I've replaced the reading questions for next time (Tuesday, 2/20) with those above. Folks who prepared for the above questions will have another bite at the apple, as it were.

As I was saying, we revisited our readings from last time, spending most of our time getting through Firestone and Nozick.

Firestone is challenging, in part because she makes some rather dramatic claims (men can't love!). There is also a tone of anger or stridency in her writings which can be off-putting.

As I suggested in class, I think it is important to understand 1) the context in which Firestone is writing--viz., a deeply sexist American culture of the 1960's and 70's, and 2) that her more extraordinary claims about love in a sexist and patriarchal culture must be distinguished from her account of love. It is her account of love, of course, that most interests us.

To be in love, for Firestone, is to be in a state of total mutual vulnerability. We come to love, she says, out of self-interest. We want the protection, comfort, and nurturing others can provide. We want, in short, their virtues to belong to us. When reciprocated, the upshot is that we find ourselves in a state of interpersonal dependency and mutual reliance. Yet this is purely and simply mutual vulnerability: The lover can harm the beloved like no other, and vice versa. It might not be hyperbole to think of it as a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction, the explicit policy designed to keep the U.S. and the Soviets from obliterating the world in a nuclear holocaust during the cold war.

Firestone has no objection to loving in her sense. (Although we might object to her account for much the same reason I objected to Singer's account: At best she's identified a necessary condition on love, but she hasn't told us anything about what love is.)

Now, for Firestone to love is simply to be in a state of mutual vulnerability. So conceived, however, love goes completely wrong in a patriarchy. Since men enjoy all the economic and social power, women only come to love as a way of gaining some economic status and protection--protection which is always at the whim of the man to whom she must prostrate (prostitute?) herself. Thus she can never be her true self: She must always be whomever she thinks her 'beloved' wants her to be. The story is not much better for men, since men are taught to fear and reject vulnerability and so cannot, and need not, allow themselves to love in a patriarchy.

Whatever we might make of Firestone's understanding of just how love is (mis)expressed in our culture, it is nonetheless important to bear in mind that her account of love in terms of mutual vulnerability is distinct from her account of how love goes wrong in our culture, even if the former is used to explain the latter.

Next today we examined Nozick's account of love. I think we made good progress today, but we did not get to Baier's account of love. Next time we'll start with her account before moving on to Frankfurt's book, "The Reasons of Love".

Nozick construes love not as mutual vulnerability (Firestone's account) but as the extension of mutual welfare between two people to create a third 'person', or a we. That is, love is not defined by the injury one person can do to another in love, but by the extension of one's welfare in such a way that the good that happens to one's beloved is good for the lover, while the harm that befalls the beloved harms the lover. Thus it follows from Nozick's account that love results in a state of mutual vulnerability, but not for the reasons Firestone imagines. Lovers are vulnerable to their beloveds not because their beloveds can take advantage or abuse them but because the lover has extended his or her welfare to include the beloved's welfare. Thus injury to the beloved injures the lover as surely as if the lover has been injured. On the other hand, the achievements of the beloved are the lovers achievements, and the good the beloved does or is done them is likewise a good for the lover.

Being in a state of extended mutual welfare creates, Nozick thinks, a new person. What then is a person? The concept of a person is at once extremely important (persons have rights and obligations non-persons don't) and unbelievably difficult to pin down. I won't say its impossible to find a defensible account of personhood, because it may be that there is one we just haven't discovered as yet, despite some of the most brilliant minds in philosophy having earnestly studied it for thousands of years now.

I should put together a handout on this, but suffice it for now to say that the usual things we might identify as persons, bodies and minds, won't do. If you want to find out more about this fascinating topic, we will take it up later this Spring in Minds and Machines.

In any case, Nozick's presupposition that a sufficient condition on personhood is having a welfare is at least as plausible, or not, as any other account. That's as close to philosophical shrug as one can come, of course, since we just don't know what a person is.

As appealing as Nozick's account may be, I argue it suffers from the same problem Singer and Firestone's accounts do. That is, we might have uncovered a necessary condition on love, such that if one is in love one's welfare is extended, but we still don't have an account of love. One can imagine cases where welfare is extended (perhaps artificially) without there being also love. In a way, enemies have also extended their welfare to one another, just inversely to the way Nozick thinks welfare is extended in love: The harm that befalls the hated benefits the hater; the good that befalls the hated harms the hater.

So mere extension of welfare won't do. It has to be welfare extended in just the right way. Well, in what way, precisely? Further, even if we have welfare extended in just the right way, we still don't seem to be able to say what love is, fundamentally. That is, we might have it that welfare properly--proper to love, that is to say, and however we flesh the notion out--extended is found exactly when there is love. So we know when to look for love, but we still don't know what love is.