Love, Reason, and Will

Kierkegaard After Frankfurt

Anthony Rudd, John Davenport

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781628927313
• eBook ISBN: 9781628927344
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

Love, Reason, and Will: Kierkegaard After Frankfurt introduces and investigates themes common to Harry G. Frankfurt and Søren Kierkegaard, focusing particularly on their understanding of love. Several distinguished contributors argue that Kierkegaard's insights about love, volition, and identity can help us to evaluate aspects of Frankfurt's well-known arguments about love and caring; similarly, Frankfurt's analyses of the higher-order will, valuing, and self-love help clarify themes in Kierkegaard's Works of Love and other books. By bringing these two key thinkers into conversation with each other, we may glean a new understanding of the structure of love, reasons for love or deriving from loving, and more broadly, the central ethical questions of "how to live" and to develop an authentic identity and meaningful life. Love, Reason, and Will will appeal to readers interested in the philosophy of action and emotions, continental thought (especially in the existential tradition), the study of character in psychology, and theological work on neighbor-love and virtues.

Section I

Love and the Ground of Love

1

The Sources and Resources of Love: A Platonic Response to Frankfurt

Charles Taliaferro

Sometimes philosophers adopt such radically different concepts and terms that arguments between them seem fruitless. An old-fashioned, committed logical behaviorist might well profess simply to not understand when a phenomenologist, committed to a first-person point of view, complains that behaviorism does not account for her feeling pain. In response to the behaviorist, the phenomenologist pleads, “Do we not feel pain? Do we not perceive colors? Do we not hear sounds? No argument is offered because the only appeal that can properly be made is to our own experience of what it is like to be sentient or conscious in some further way.”¹

Would this impress a logical behaviorist? In my view, it should, but it is almost guaranteed only to evince the following response: “You are simply begging the question.” Fortunately, Harry Frankfurt’s work—whether he is offering a conceptual analysis of “bullshit” or of voluntary action—is rich with examples that appeal to ordinary language, reflection, and common sense. The clarity and elegance of his writing, and his reluctance to use highly technical terms, make him an ideal interlocutor.

In this chapter, the focus is on whether Frankfurt’s work on love, care, and values does justice to our shared, ordinary, commonsense understanding of what love, care, and values are. For all I know, there may not be a crystal clear, single, ordinary, commonsense understanding of these things, but my proposal is that while Frankfurt’s account has intuitive support and an enviable simplicity, it is nonetheless wide of the mark concerning what at least many of us mean and do when we love, care for, and value one another. I propose that we need a larger, comparatively more complex view of values to do justice to the matters at hand.

In this chapter, I will argue that ordinary reflection and commonsense examples lend more support to a Platonic account of love and values than they do to Frankfurt’s more economic account. It might be easier to simply juxtapose a general form of moral realism vis-à-vis Frankfurt, but I will use the term “Platonic” in the broad fashion outlined below, giving an overview of the Platonic (with only minimal references to the views of the historical Plato), before going on to Frankfurt’s fascinating work.

I. A Platonic preface

From a broadly Platonic perspective—my preferred version of Platonism is the Cambridge Platonist school of thought in seventeenth-century England—love is a response to value.² When you love another person, you love her for the value or worth she has intrinsically or for her own sake. As Fritz Wenisch puts it: “Love for another human is a response motivated by the other’s intrinsic preciousness, by regarding her as what she is in herself rather than viewing her from the perspective of personal gain.”³ In the Platonic tradition, we recognize the distinction between recognizing the good of the other (beneficent love or intentio benevolentiae) and the desire to be united with the other (unitive love or the intentio unionis). When these conflict, the Platonic tradition (at least in its Christian form) invariably gives primacy to beneficent love. In this framework, my love for my wife, Jil, is not what gives her value—either for herself or for me—and my love for my son, Tiepolo, is not what gives Tiepolo value or makes him interesting. Now if lust for another person eclipsed my love for Jil, then (in the Platonic Christian tradition) I will have failed in an important office of love: fidelity. Likewise, if I falter in my love for Tiepolo because my narcissism has eclipsed my concern for the well-being of creatures who are not me, I have failed to be a loving father. In a Christian Platonic world, a person has reasons to love others because others have value or are precious, even if that person has no desire or inclination to love them.

One further feature of this tradition before turning to Frankfurt: in a healthy relationship, the Platonic Christian tradition sees the beloved herself or himself as the principal object of love rather than the love itself, whether this takes the form of (to put things awkwardly) loving being loved or simply loving to love. In other words, in a healthy relationship, you do not love the beloved—principally because she loves you, or because you enjoy being a loving person. Rather, the beloved herself is the source and reason for your love. If what you really love in a relationship is the other person’s love, then when or if she stops loving you, the object of your love is no longer there. Surely it is natural and good to love being loved (ceterus peribus), but I suggest that the more enduring and deeper love is directed upon the beloved whether or not the love is returned.⁴ And now, on to Frankfurt!

II. Love á la Frankfurt

Frankfurt’s position is at odds with Platonism and some other forms of moral realism, but not so different that arguments and objections are impossible. The heart of the matter in terms of values is that Frankfurt locates the source of values in terms of what persons care about:

It is by caring about things that we infuse the world with importance. This provides us with stable ambitions and concerns; it marks our interests and goals. The importance that our caring creates for us defines the framework of standards and aims in terms of which we endeavor to conduct our lives. A person who cares about something is guided, as his attitudes and his actions are shaped, by his continuing interest in it. Insofar as he does care about certain things, this determines how he thinks it important for him to conduct his life. The totality of the various things that a person cares about – together with his ordering of how important to him they are – effectively specifies his answer to the question of how to live. (RL, 23)

Unlike a Platonist who responds to a value that has an independent claim on her affection and allegiance, Frankfurt sees persons as the ones who infuse or bring about the world as important (or at least important for those of us doing the caring).

I have two questions at the outset before offering a further overview of Professor Frankfurt’s position. First, I question the extent to which an appeal to care is truly explanatory. Arguably, Frankfurt’s position seems to come close to a tautology. He proposes that our standards, aims, attitudes, actions, and conduct are the results of our caring and what we care about, but in a sense isn’t the reference to our standards, and so on, simply a reference to different ways of caring? Imagine this exchange:

Jane:		“I am looking for a way to get my son to France that meets the highest standards of safety I can afford.”
John:		“Why do you care about spending the most you can afford to get your son to France?”
Jane:		“Because I care about my son.”

I suppose there might be more reasons that are in the offing. Frankfurt allows that there may be reasons (or causes) for our caring that have a biological, evolutionary background, and Jane may have reasons for pouring more money into her son’s transport than into getting him a good haircut. But once care is in place (“I care for my son”) and we forego appealing to the value of the son, it seems as though caring itself is basic and not further explained in terms of justification. (So, I suggest, evolutionary biology may partially account for why I love Tiepolo, but I do not think that amounts to an account of why my love is justified or warranted or good.) I will continue to press home the importance of having reasons for caring, but let me put the matter in terms of a related question: casting aside whether Frankfurt’s position amounts to an explanatory tautology (I care because I care), let us consider the extent to which Frankfurt’s appeal to care matches our pre-philosophical (everyday or intuitive) understanding of care and value.

What seems to be missing in Frankfurt’s account is concern with what a person should care about. In the passage cited above, Frankfurt refers to “his answer to the question of how to live.” Evidently, the answer to the question “how should you live?” for any individual will lie in what the individual cares about. If an individual has no cares (consider the central character in Graham Greene’s A Burnt Out Case), presumably there is no answer for that individual. In effect, Frankfurt defends this position by contending that an appeal to some kind of independent standard about how to live is problematic.

Frankfurt thinks that appeal to how we should live faces a problem of circularity. I cite this objection at length:

In order to carry out a rational evaluation of some way of living, a person must first know what evaluative criteria to employ and how to employ them. He needs to know what considerations count in favor of choosing to live in one way rather than in another, what considerations count against, and the relative weights of each. For instance, it must be clear to him how to evaluate the fact that a certain way of living leads more than others (or less than others) to personal satisfaction, to pleasure, to power, to glory, to creativity, to spiritual depth, to a harmonious relationship with the precepts of religion, to conformity with the requirements of morality, and so on.

The trouble here is a rather obvious sort of circularity. In order for a person to be able even to conceive and to initiate an inquiry into how to live, he must already have settled upon the judgments at which the inquiry aims. Identifying the question of how one should live – that is, understanding just what question it is and just how to go about answering it – requires that one specify the criteria that are to be employed in evaluating various ways of living. Identifying the question is, indeed, tantamount to specifying those criteria: what the question asks is, precisely, what way of living best satisfies them. But identifying the criteria to be employed in evaluating various ways of living is also tantamount to providing an answer to the question of how to live, for the answer to this question is simply that one should live in the way that best satisfies whatever criteria are to be employed for evaluating lives. (RL, 24–25)

Just as I suggested earlier that Frankfurt’s position seems close to a tautology in the wake of the question “why care?” (“I care because I care”), perhaps those of us who wish to have justificatory reasons as to why we should care about this or that do not have access to the relevant free-standing or independent criteria. After all, what are the differences between “I care about that criterion about how we should live because I care about it” and “I care about that criterion because the criterion seems right to me”? If Frankfurt is correct, then it seems that I would not be able to conceive of such criteria unless I were already working with a prior understanding of what kind of living is satisfying.

To some extent, I think Frankfurt is correct about one difficulty of appealing to criteria, but I suggest that the use of criteria in assessing ways of living does not involve any vicious circularity. The reply I propose is similar to the reply that some philosophers make to the problem of the criterion in epistemology. Let us consider the latter and then return to the terrain of values.

In epistemology, it has been charged that one cannot know anything (X) without knowing some criterion in virtue of which X is known. But how do you know that that criterion is correct? Perhaps you need an additional criterion by which to know whether the first-order criterion is correct. But then yet another criterion is needed, ad infinitum. Roderick Chisholm broke the regress by embracing what he called particularism: he held that you can know and grasp certain truths antecedent to possessing a criterion of how you know them.⁵ Chisholm’s preference for particularism rather than “methodism” (the view that knowledge of particulars is only possible if you know the method you are employing is accurate) was part of his “common sense” approach to philosophical problems. Chisholm was very much of the same mind as Thomas Reid and G.E. Moore; each philosopher claimed to be more certain of such ordinary beliefs as “I have hands” than they were of skeptical arguments that would defeat or undermine such claims. I suggest that the problem of the criterion in values should not usher in skepticism about the reality and role of values (in accounting for why we love this or that) any more than the problem of the criterion in epistemology should usher in skepticism about the reality and role of epistemic norms (in accounting for why we should believe this or that based on evidence). So, I propose that a common sense, intuitive value that most of us can grasp is that it is good for parents to care for their children or, putting the point more poignantly, parents should care for their children (whether or not they actually care). Obviously, all sorts of caveats may need to be introduced to take care of deviant cases, but surely something like such a principle is a decent starting point.

With any invocation of values that are not reducible to statements about “natural facts,” naturalists will be most unhappy, but two points may be offered on behalf of Platonists and other moral realists.

First, as a number of philosophers from G.E.M. Anscombe to Derek Parfit have argued, without an appeal to irreducible moral truths or principles, persons who care about doing great harm (e.g. genocide) or care about doing what seems utterly bizarre have reasons for doing the harm and the bizarre. Anscombe introduced the following case in which she claimed that for the agent to reply that he did the act “for no particular reason” is inappropriate. If someone hunted out all the green books in his house and spread them out carefully on the roof, and gave one of these answers (“for no particular reason,” “I just felt like doing it”) to the question “Why?,” his words would be unintelligible unless they are taken as joking or mystification.⁶ Arguably, there are cases when reported desires and motives seem so far afield (“I am placing my watch by a tree in case the tree wants to know the time”) that they simply fail to make any sense.

Second, on behalf of accepting irreducible moral principles, it can be argued that this is no worse than accepting irreducible epistemic principles. The latter concern matters of evidence and justification about ordinary beliefs.⁷ Arguably, if a naturalistic account of rationality and belief is not problematic, w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations for Parenthetical Citations
• Introduction
• Section 1: Love and the Ground of Love
• Section 2: Love and Self-Love
• Section 3: Love and Its Reasons
• List of Contributors
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint