Examination II
Thursday, 6/13, we will take the second of our five examinations for the semester. Plan on spending about the first hour or so of class-time answering the following three questions. Please be sure to arrive on time for class. As per the syllabus, the second examination is worth 200 points. You should try to outline answers to each of the questions and be sure you can write clear, complete, and comprehensive answers to them all. You may bring a single handwritten 4inx6in notecard to keep track of your outlines, for which you may use both sides of the notecard.
1. Our Better Half
We argued in class that the fanciful, maybe also fantastic story Aristophanes tells in the Symposium is too readily dismissed as absurd insofar as it captures deeper truths about the experience of romantic loving, truths any short list of which might include,
- Not having a lover can often leave us feeling incomplete or insufficient (witness the pathetic incels movement.)
- Not having a lover is frequently accompanied by feelings of longing and desire for what is apparently missing in our lives.
- Falling in love feels very much like having discovered that perfect fit to our puzzle piece, somehow completing us or making us whole.
- Being in love makes us feel powerful, perhaps even invincible.
- Losing a lover, whether by disaster (death) or betrayal (cheating), feels like having a part ripped from us, leaving us staggered and wounded.
Take all of these as givens by Aristophanes. That is, just assume that they are true regardless of whether you agree with them or not. If they are true, then, it must be possible for a theory of love to explain why they are true without resorting to bizarre or implausible mythology in the process. Of the contemporary theories of love we have considered--Singer, Firestone, Nozick, Baier, and Frankfurt, specifically--which one best explains (justifies, rationalizes, or would otherwise predict or entail) these presumed facts? Precisely how does the theory explain each of the above truths? Are there points on which the explanation is lacking? How might you revise the theory to better explain these truths?
2. He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
What is Nozick's account of love? How does his account differ from Firestone's? Of the two accounts, which is the most philosophically defensible? Why? Firestone couples her account of love with a feminist interpretation of freudian psychology to argue that men cannot love. Suppose, however, that we substitute Firestone's account of love with Nozick's. With Nozick's account instead of her own, could Firestone continue to argue that men are incapable of love in a patriarchy? Why or why not?
3. The Elephant in the Room
We have argued that most of the accounts of love we've considered this semester at best get only part of the story of love right. In particular, we argued that many theories of love give a necessary, but not sufficient, condition on love. For example, recall Firestone's account whereby love is a state of mutual vulnerability. It may be true, then, that
If X loves Y, then X and Y are mutually vulnerable to one another.
Indeed, let us just simply grant for the sake of argument that love implies mutual vulnerability. That is, let us grant that mutual vulnerability is a necessary condition on love. It seems another and much more difficult proposition to accept that mutual vulnerability implies love. That is, mutual vulnerability does not also seem to be a sufficient condition on love, since it seems false to say that
If X and Y are mutually vulnerable to one another, then X loves Y.
To show this, all we need is an example where we have mutual vulnerability, but no love. Give such an example to show that Firestone has at most captured a small part of the phenomenon of love. Can you conduct similar analyses for Singer, Nozick, and Baier? If so, do so. If not, do you think the theory indeed fully accounts for love? Why or why not?