The Reasons of Love

Harry G. Frankfurt

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400826063
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller On Bullshit, a profound meditation on how and why we love In The Reasons of Love, leading moral philosopher and bestselling author Harry Frankfurt argues that the key to a fulfilled life is to pursue wholeheartedly what one cares about, that love is the most authoritative form of caring, and that the purest form of love is, in a complicated way, self-love. Through caring, we infuse the world with meaning. Caring provides us with stable ambitions and concerns, and it shapes the framework of aims and interests within which we lead our lives. Love is a nonvoluntary, disinterested concern for the flourishing of what we love—and self-love, as distinct from self-indulgence, is at heart of this concern. The most elementary form of self-love is no more than the desire to love, and self-love is simply a commitment to finding meaning in our lives.

Two

On Love, and Its Reasons

1 There has recently been quite a bit of interest among philosophers in issues concerning whether our conduct must invariably be guided strictly by universal moral principles, which we apply impartially in all situations, or whether favoritism of one sort or another may sometimes be reasonable. In fact, we do not always feel that it is necessary or important for us to be meticulously evenhanded. The situation strikes us differently when our children, or our countries, or our most cherished personal ambitions are at stake. We commonly think that it is appropriate, and perhaps even obligatory, to favor certain people over others who may be just as worthy but with whom our relationships are more distant. Similarly, we often consider ourselves entitled to prefer investing our resources in projects to which we happen to be especially devoted, instead of in others that we may readily acknowledge to have somewhat greater inherent merit. The problem with which philosophers have been concerned is not so much to determine whether preferences of this kind are ever legitimate. Rather, it is to explain under what conditions and in what way they may be justified.

An example that has been widely discussed in this connection has to do with a man who sees two people on the verge of drowning, who can save only one, and who must decide which of the two he will try to save. One of them is a person whom he does not know. The other is his wife. It is hard to think, of course, that the man should make up his mind by just tossing a coin. We are strongly inclined to believe that it would be far more appropriate for him, in a situation like this one, to put aside considerations of impartiality or fairness altogether. Surely the man should rescue his wife. But what is his warrant for treating the two endangered people so unequally? What acceptable principle can the man invoke that would legitimate his decision to let the stranger drown?

One of the most interesting contemporary philosophers, Bernard Williams, suggests that the man already goes wrong if he thinks it is incumbent upon him even to look for a principle from which he could infer that, in circumstances like those in which he finds himself, it is permissible to save one’s wife. Instead, Williams says, “it might … [be] hoped … that his motivating thought, fully spelled out, would be [just] the thought that it was his wife.” If he adds to this the further thought that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save one’s wife, Williams admonishes that the man is having “one thought too many.” In other words, there is something fishy about the whole notion that when his wife is drowning, the man needs to rely upon some general rule from which a reason that justifies his decision to save her can be derived.¹

2 I am very sympathetic to Williams’s line of thought.² However, the example as he presents it is significantly out of focus. It cannot work in the way that he intends, if what it stipulates concerning one of the drowning people is merely that she is the man’s wife. After all, suppose that for quite good reasons the man detests and fears his wife. Suppose that she detests him too, and that she has recently engaged in several viciously determined attempts to murder him. Or suppose that it was nothing but a cold-bloodedly arranged marriage of convenience anyhow, and that they have never even been in the same room together except during a perfunctory two-minute wedding ceremony thirty years ago. Surely, to specify nothing more than a bare legal relationship between the man and the drowning woman misses the point.

Let us put aside the matter of their civil status, then, and stipulate instead that the man in the example loves one (and not the other) of the two people who are drowning. In that case, it certainly would be incongruous for him to look for a reason to save her. If he does truly love her, then he necessarily already has that reason. It is simply that she is in trouble and needs his help. Just in itself, the fact that he loves her entails that he takes her distress as a more powerful reason for going to her aid than for going to the aid of someone about whom he knows nothing. The need of his beloved for help provides him with this reason, without requiring that he think of any additional considerations and without the interposition of any general rules.

To take such things into account would indeed be to have one thought too many. If the man does not recognize the distress of the woman he loves as a reason for saving her rather than the stranger, then he does not genuinely love her at all. Loving someone or something essentially means or consists in, among other things, taking its interests as reasons for acting to serve those interests. Love is itself, for the lover, a source of reasons. It creates the reasons by which his acts of loving concern and devotion are inspired.³

3 Love is often understood as being, most basically, a response to the perceived worth of the beloved. We are moved to love something, on this account, by an appreciation of what we take to be its exceptional inherent value. The appeal of that value is what captivates us and turns us into lovers. We begin loving the things that we love because we are struck by their value, and we continue to love them for the sake of their value. If we did not find the beloved valuable, we would not love it.

This may well fit certain cases of what would commonly be identified as love. However, the sort of phenomenon that I have in mind when referring here to love is essentially something else. As I am construing it, love is not necessarily a response grounded in awareness of the inherent value of its object. It may sometimes arise like that, but it need not do so. Love may be brought about—in ways that are poorly understood—by a disparate variety of natural causes. It is entirely possible for a person to be caused to love something without noticing its value, or without being at all impressed by its value, or despite recognizing that there really is nothing especially valuable about it. It is even possible for a person to come to love something despite recognizing that its inherent nature is actually and utterly bad. That sort of love is doubtless a misfortune. Still, such things happen.

It is true that the beloved invariably is, indeed, valuable to the lover. However, perceiving that value is not at all an indispensable formative or grounding condition of the love. It need not be a perception of value in what he loves that moves the lover to love it. The truly essential relationship between love and the value of the beloved goes in the opposite direction. It is not necessarily as a result of recognizing their value and of being captivated by it that we love things. Rather, what we love necessarily acquires value for us because we love it. The lover does invariably and necessarily perceive the beloved as valuable, but the value he sees it to possess is a value that derives from and that depends upon his love.

Consider the love of parents for their children. I can declare with unequivocal confidence that I do not love my children because I am aware of some value that inheres in them independent of my love for them. The fact is that I loved them even before they were born—before I had any especially relevant information about their personal characteristics or their particular merits and virtues. Furthermore, I do not believe that the valuable qualities they do happen to possess, strictly in their own rights, would really provide me with a very compelling basis for regarding them as having greater worth than many other possible objects of love that in fact I love much less. It is quite clear to me that I do not love them more than other children because I believe they are better.

At times, we speak of people or of other things as “unworthy” of our love. Perhaps this means that the cost of loving them would be greater than the benefit of doing so; or perhaps it means that to love those things would be in some way demeaning. In any case, if I ask myself whether my children are worthy of my love, my emphatic inclination is to reject the question as misguided. This is not because it goes so clearly without saying that my children are worthy. It is because my love for them is not at all a response to an evaluation either of them or of the consequences for me of loving them. If my children should turn out to be ferociously wicked, or if it should become apparent that loving them somehow threatened my hope of leading a decent life, I might perhaps recognize that my love for them was regrettable. But I suspect that after coming finally to acknowledge this, I would continue to love them anyhow.

It is not because I have noticed their value, then, that I love my children as I do. Of course, I do perceive them to have value; so far as I am concerned, indeed, their value is beyond measure. That, however, is not the basis of my love. It is really the other way around. The particular value that I attribute to my children is not inherent in them but depends upon my love for them. The reason they are so precious to me is simply that I love them so much. As for why it is that human beings do tend generally to love their children, the explanation presumably lies in the evolutionary pressures of natural selection. In any case, it is plainly on account of my love for them that they have acquired in my eyes a value that otherwise they would certainly not possess.

This relationship between love and the value of the beloved—namely, that love is not necessarily grounded in the value of the beloved but does necessarily make the beloved valuable to the lover—holds not only for parental love but quite generally.⁴ Most profoundly, perhaps, it is love that accounts for the value to us of life itself. Our lives normally have for us a value that we accept as commandingly authoritative. Moreover, the value to us of living radiates pervasively. It radically conditions the value that we attribute to many other things. It is a powerful—indeed, a comprehensively foundational—generator of value. There are innumerable things that we care about a great deal, and that therefore are very important to us, just because of the ways in which they bear upon our interest in survival.

Why do we so naturally, and with such unquestioning assurance, take self-preservation to be an incomparably compelling and legitimate reason for pursuing certain courses of action? We certainly do not assign this overwhelming importance to staying alive because we believe that there is some great value inherent in our lives, or in what we are doing with them—a value that is independent of our own attitudes and dispositions. Even when we think rather well of ourselves, and suppose that our lives may actually be valuable in such a way, that is not normally why we are so determined to hang on to them. We take the fact that some course of action would contribute to our survival as a reason for pursuing it just because, presumably again thanks to natural selection, we are innately constituted to love living.

4 Let me now attempt to explain what I have in mind when I speak here of love.

The object of love is often a concrete individual: for instance, a person or a country. It may also be something more abstract: for instance, a tradition, or some moral or nonmoral ideal. There will frequently be greater emotional color and urgency in love when the beloved is an individual than when it is something like social justice, or scientific truth, or the way a certain family or a certain cultural group does things; but that is not always the case. In any event, it is not among the defining features of love that it must be hot rather than cool.

One distinctive feature of loving has to do with the particular status of the value that is accorded to its objects. Insofar as we care about something at all, we regard it as important to ourselves; but we may consider it to have that importance only because we regard it as a means to something else. When we love something, however, we go further. We care about it not as merely a means, but as an end. It is in the nature of loving that we consider its objects to be valuable in themselves and to be important to us for their own sakes.

Love is, most centrally, a disinterested concern for the existence of what is loved, and for what is good for it. The lover desires that his beloved flourish and not be harmed; and he does not desire this just for the sake of promoting some other goal. Someone might care about social justice only because it reduces the likelihood of rioting; and someone might care about the health of another person just because she cannot be useful to him unless she is in good shape. For the lover, the condition of his beloved is important in itself, apart from any bearing that it may have on other matters.

Love may involve strong feelings of attraction, which the lover supports and rationalizes with flattering descriptions of the beloved. Moreover, lovers often enjoy the company of their beloveds, cherish various types of intimate connection with them, and yearn for reciprocity. These enthusiasms are not essential. Nor is it essential that a person like what he loves. He may even find it distasteful. As in other modes of caring, the heart of the matter is neither affective nor cognitive. It is volitional. Loving something has less to do with what a person believes, or with how he feels, than with a configuration of the will that consists in a practical concern for what is good for the beloved. This volitional configuration shapes the dispositions and conduct of the lover with respect to what he loves, by guiding him in the design and ordering of his relevant purposes and priorities.

It is important to avoid confusing love—as circumscribed by the concept that I am defining—with infatuation, lust, obsession, possessiveness, and dependency in their various forms. In particular, relationships that are primarily romantic or sexual do not provide very authentic or illuminating paradigms of love as I am construing it. Relationships of those kinds typically include a number of vividly distracting elements, which do not belong to the essential nature of love as a mode of disinterested concern, but that are so confusing that they make it nearly impossible for anyone to be clear about just what is going on. Among relationships between humans, the love of parents for their infants or small children is the species of caring that comes closest to offering recognizably pure instances of love.

There is a certain variety of concern for others that may also be entirely disinterested, but that differs from love because it is impersonal. Someone who is devoted to helping the sick or the poor for their own sakes may be quite indifferent to the particularity of those whom he seeks to help. What qualifies people to be beneficiaries of his charitable concern is not that he loves them. His generosity is not a response to their identities as individuals; it is not aroused by their personal characteristics. It is induced merely by the fact that he regards them as members of a relevant class. For someone who is eager to help the sick or the poor, any sick or poor person will do.

When it comes to what we love, on the other hand, that sort of indifference to the specificity of the object is out of the question. The significance to the lover of what he loves is not that his beloved is an instance or an exemplar. Its importance to him is not generic; it is ineluctably particular. For a person who wants simply to help the sick or the poor, it would make perfectly good sense to choose his beneficiaries randomly from among those who are sick or poor enough to qualify. It does not matter who in particular the needy persons are. Since he does not really care about any of them as such, they are entirely acceptable substitutes for each other. The situation of a lover is very different. There can be no equivalent substitute for his beloved. It might really be all the same to someone moved by charity whether he helps this needy person or that one. It cannot possibly be all the same to the lover whether he is devoting himself disinterestedly to what he actually does love or—no matter how similar it might be—to something else instead.

Finally, it is a necessary feature of love that it is not under our direct and immediate voluntary control. What a person cares about, and how much he cares about it, may under certain conditions be up to him. It may at times be possible for him to bring it about that he cares about something, or that he does not care about it, just by making up his mind one way or the other. Whether the requirements of protecting and supporting that thing provide him with acceptable reasons for acting, and how weighty those reasons are, depends in cases like that upon what he himself decides. With regard to certain things, however, a person may discover that he cannot affect whether or how much he cares about them merely by his own decision. The issue is not up to him at all.

For instance, under normal conditions people cannot help caring quite a bit about staying...