Love and Its Objects

What Can We Care For?

C. Maurer, T. Milligan, K. Pacovská, C. Maurer, T. Milligan, K. Pacovská

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137383303
• eBook ISBN: 9781137383310
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This collection of essays on the philosophy of love, by leading contributors to the discussion, places particular emphasis on the relation between love, its character and appropriateness and the objects towards which it is directed: romantic and erotic partners, persons, ourselves, strangers, non-human animals and art.

Part I

Romantic and Erotic Love

1

Between I and Thou – On the Dialogical Nature of Love

Angelika Krebs

1 The basic intuition: love is sharing

What is the nature of love? Why is love so precious? Why would happy women and men wish to spend their lives without partners or close friends? One popular answer to these questions is that loving somebody means rejoicing in their joy, suffering on account of their suffering, and doing whatever you can to promote their good life. In loving somebody you reach out to the world. Valuing the flourishing of beings, or even things and ideas, other than yourself gives meaning to your life. The purest form of love is selfless maternal love. Call this the curative model of love. According to this model, love is opposed to egoism. The curative model constitutes the major paradigm in the philosophy of love. It can be traced back to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Some contemporary proponents are Lawrence Blum, Harry Frankfurt, and Hugh LaFollette.

Yet there is another way to understand the nature and value of love. According to this second view, love is dialogical rather than altruistic. Love is about sharing and not about caring. Loving somebody means enjoying things together, talking, hiking, or making music together. In loving somebody you enlarge yourself by closely interacting with and responding to the other person. We do not flourish as atoms; our nature is social. The purest form of love is all-embracing erotic love. Call this the dialogical model of love. According to this model, love is opposed to individualism. Love is neither altruistic nor egoistic; it is ‘nostristic’ (to borrow a term from Ortega y Gasset). According to the dialogical model, interpersonal love is clearly different from the ‘love’ a person feels for things or ideas.

The dialogical model is not standard in the philosophy of love. One prominent proponent is Martin Buber with his I and Thou from 1923. For Buber, love is between the partners; it is not about each partner having the other as his or her object: ‘Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have the Thou only for its “content”, its object; but love is between I and Thou’ (Buber 1958, pp. 14–5). Love doesn’t merely live in the lovers, Buber explains, the lovers also live in their love. They build the house of their love together and inhabit it. To understand love we have to look at the house and not at the lovers taken by themselves.

There are, to be sure, other philosophers today who are sympathetic to the dialogical approach to love. Martha Nussbaum is one of them, as are Bennett Helm, Niko Kolodny, and Roger Scruton. Nussbaum (1990) stresses the mutuality requirement in Aristotle’s account of love and friendship. Similarly, in Love’s Knowledge, she has an eye for joint feeling and action as pictured in the love stories of Henry James and Ann Beattie. In Upheavals of Thought, however, she treats love as an emotion like any other, an emotion felt when one finds immense value in an object and sees it as radiant, wonderful, and deeply needed. This is not exactly love as the curative model would have it, but it is just as monological.

This chapter probes and spells out the dialogical model of love. The basic intuition is that this model gets to the heart of what romantic love can be. In contrast, the curative model demands both too much (too much altruism) and too little (too little dialogue). The curative model may offer some insight into the love one has for one’s children or for relatives and friends who, through some serious illness, depend on one’s care. Love may indeed be a family resemblance concept. This chapter does not address this issue, however; it concentrates on love between healthy adults.

What follows gives some substance to the idea of dialogical love by studying a literary example: Isabel Archer’s quest for dialogical love in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (Section 2). We then analyze the notions of shared action (Section 3) and shared feeling (Section 4). We need to understand these two notions if we are to understand dialogical love. For, in dialogical love, the partners share what is most important in their practical and emotional lives (Section 5). The chapter draws on three main sources: phenomenological studies on joint feeling from the beginning of the twentieth century (especially Max Scheler’s distinction between four forms of sympathy), the contemporary analytical debate on joint action, and the contemporary philosophy of emotion (especially Martha Nussbaum’s cognitivist account).

2 An example: Isabel Archer’s quest for dialogical love in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady

In Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady from 1880–81, young American Isabel Archer travels Europe enchanting her relatives and new acquaintances with her independent spirit, fresh imagination, and good looks. After refusing two honorable offers of marriage and unexpectedly inheriting a large sum of money, she falls prey to fortune hunter Gilbert Osmond, an impoverished aesthete, and finds herself in Rome stuck in a suffocating marriage.

In coming to Europe, Isabel had set out to be free and discover the world. ‘She had too many ideas for herself; but that was just what one married for, to share them with someone else’ (James 1970, IV, p. 195). Osmond had seemed to her like the right person at the beginning:

... a man living in the open air of the world, indifferent to small considerations, caring only for truth and knowledge and believing that two intelligent people ought to look for them together and, whether they found them or not, find at least some happiness in the search. (James 1970, IV, pp. 195–6)

One reason Isabel marries Osmond is because she admires his ‘beautiful mind’ and expects him to share with her a life dedicated to knowledge and moral goodness. She expects to enjoy their common pursuit of knowledge, not just in virtue of the goodness of searching for truth but in virtue of the goodness of doing so together.

Isabel’s quest for a love grounded in the joint pursuit of truth is, however, not the only reason for her marriage. She also has an altruistic motive:

That he was poor and lonely yet that somehow he was noble – that was what had interested her and seemed to give her her opportunity. ... She would launch his boat for him. ... As she looked back at the passion of those full weeks she perceived in it a kind of maternal strain – the happiness of a woman who felt that she was a contributor, that she came with charged hands. But for her money, as she saw today, she would never have done it. (James 1970, IV, pp. 192–3)

The altruistic motive even functions as the effective motive in Isabel’s decision to marry Osmond. It is her money that makes her look for an opportunity to do something good for others, and poor, lonely Osmond presents himself as an excellent opportunity. You can read Henry James’s novel as a quest for dialogical love gone astray through the intrusion of a curative motive alien to romantic love proper.

Instead of the envisioned happy joint pursuit of knowledge, Isabel finds Osmond unwilling to share his life with her, ‘his egotism lay hidden like a serpent in a bank of flowers’ (James 1970, IV, p. 196). She finds him even hating her:

The real offence, as she ultimately perceived, was her having a mind of her own at all. Her mind was to be his – attached to his own like a small garden-plot to a deer-park. He would rake the soil gently and water the flowers; he would weed the beds and gather an occasional nosegay. It would be a pretty piece of property for a proprietor already far-reaching. (James 1970, IV, p. 200)

Osmond had pretended to search for truth in life and to want to do so with Isabel. In reality he had wanted her money and her mind to better display his alleged superiority to the world. His egoism had made him incapable of truly sharing his life with another person.

What had seemed like a sharing of life at the beginning, Osmond’s opening Isabel’s eyes to the ‘infinite vulgarity of things and of the virtue of keeping one’s self unspotted by it’ (James 1970, IV, p. 197) gets revealed as the mere appearance of sharing. When Isabel realizes this, she finds herself trapped in a house of ‘darkness’, ‘dumbness’, and ‘suffocation’: ‘Osmond’s beautiful mind gave it neither light nor air; Osmond’s beautiful mind indeed seemed to peep down from a small high window and mock her’ (James 1970, IV, p. 196).

The love between Isabel and Osmond fails because of Isabel’s altruism and Osmond’s egoism. If it were not for her altruism, Isabel would not have rushed into a marriage with someone unable to share his life with another person. To be sure, Isabel is not an angel and Osmond is not the devil. This is Henry James, after all! For Isabel to be attracted by Osmond there must be some hint of aestheticism in her as well, some will to feel superior and dominate others. And for Osmond to be attracted by Isabel there must be some willingness in him to go and meet another human being – but only if it does not cost him too much. Isabel, who has a mind of her own, definitely costs him too much.

Stuck in her horrible marriage, Isabel still finds some love in her relationship with her terminally ill cousin Ralph, who had played a key role in her inheriting all that money in the first place and, like many others, had warned her of Osmond. When Ralph is about to die from consumption she goes and visits him in England against the will of her husband. She sits at her cousin’s deathbed for three days, holding his hand and waiting for a chance to talk. Ralph knows she is there and lies in grateful silence. What Isabel wants to tell him is that her marriage is a failure, that Osmond married her for the money. She had hidden this truth from her cousin ‘perpetually, in their talk, hanging out curtains and arranging screens’ (James 1970, IV, p. 203) out of shame and also out of a wish not to pain him (again, an altruistic wish keeps her from sharing her ideas). Yet at his deathbed, ‘she had lost all her shame, all wish to hide things. Now he must know; she wished him to know, for it brought them supremely together, and he was beyond the reach of pain’ (James 1970, IV, p. 413).

She tells Ralph, who answers that he always knew, to which she responds:

‘I thought you did, and I didn’t like it. But now I like it.’

‘You don’t hurt me – you make me very happy.’ And as Ralph said this there was an extraordinary gladness in his voice. She bent her head again, and pressed her lips to the back of his hand.

‘I always understood’, he continued, ‘though it was so strange – so pitiful. You wanted to look at life for yourself – but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. ... Are you going back to him?’ Ralph gasped.

‘I don’t know – I can’t tell. I shall stay here as long as I may. I don’t want to think – I needn’t think. I don’t care for anything but you, and that’s enough for the present. It will last a little yet. Here on my knees, with you dying in my arms, I’m happier than I have been for a long time. And I want you to be happy – not to think of anything sad; only to feel that I’m near you and I love you. Why should there be pain? In such hours as this what have we to do with pain? That’s not the deepest thing; there’s something deeper.’ (James 1970, IV, pp. 415–6)

The ‘deepest thing’, Isabel and Ralph know, is love, that is, togetherness in what is important in life. The happiness Ralph and Isabel encounter in looking for, bearing, and living up to the truth together is joint happiness. Their happiness is expressed through words, tone of voice, pressing of lips, and holding of hands. Isabel and Ralph share not only in action but also in feeling.

3 Analyzing joint action

An action is shared or joint (these two terms will be used interchangeably) if what each participant does can only be understood as a contribution to a common venture. In joint action, there is one principle or action scheme that guides the contributions of two or more participants. The action performed is then not the aggregate of what the participants individually do. Rather, what the participants individually do is integrated into a whole, that is, the shared action. Prime examples of such activities are waltzing, playing a string quartet, or having a philosophical discussion. Look at one person’s doings in isolation, and you will not be able to make out what it is that she is doing.

In joint action, the participants continuously attune their inputs to the inputs of the others and to the action to be actualized (a waltz and not a foxtrot, for example), and they take the others to be doing the same. Each participant combines two triangular perspectives, the first perspective connecting himself to the others and to the action, the second perspective connecting the others to himself and to the action.

As philosophers like Margaret Gilbert, John Searle, Michael Bratman, and Ulrich Baltzer have worked out, the contributions to joint action need not be alike, although there are cases (marching in step, singing in unison) that require this. Furthermore, the contributions to joint action need not be symmetrical. Some participants may contribute more than others, be it because they are more competent or because they are more invested. Moreover, joint action may be standardized (playing tennis) or improvised (playing around with a ball). Finally, joint action may be cooperative (painting the house together) or competitive (playing a game of chess).

What is required for joint action, however, is that all contribute and that their contributions fit together to actualize the common action. You cannot intend a joint action in the same way that you would intend an individual action. In act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• Part I  Romantic and Erotic Love
• Part II  The Appropriate Beloved
• Part III  Strangers
• Part IV  Humans and Persons
• Part V  The Nonhuman
• Index