Florentino Ariza, the protagonist in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, finds himself smitten in his youth with another adolescent, Fermina Daza. She returns his affections and the two begin a secret love affair. They manage to keep their relationship hidden for several months, but Fermina’s father eventually catches wind of it. He orders Florentino to stop seeing his daughter and admonishes Fermina, telling her that she can find someone better to love than a poor poet. He sends her away to the countryside to forget the affair.
Harry Frankfurt, in a discussion entitled On Caring, takes exception to such treatment. He writes that, “The significance to us of caring is more basic than the importance to us of what we care about.”1 In other words, if we can love someone, we should love him—Fermina’s father should have been happy that she could love Florentino. Susan Wolfe, however, has recently argued that this position is unacceptable.2 Surely, she contends, we can imagine situations in which we would want to tell someone that she should not love another person, that “she can do better.” I am inclined to agree with Wolfe that such circumstances do arise, but I think that her position can be made stronger. In this paper, I would like to explore grounds for telling anyone why she should or should not love something, be it another person, a piece of music, or even a type of literature.
I will focus my first section on a discussion of instrumental versus intrinsic love. I will then turn, in the second section, to Frankfurt’s position and Wolfe’s subsequent response. I will use their debate as a framework to introduce, in the third and fourth sections, respectively, two considerations that will establish my position: the joint concepts of sense history and objective relational values. The final section will address several objections to my view. It should be kept in mind throughout, however, that it is not my intention to produce an all-encompassing view of love or even to define it. The term enjoys such widespread usage that such an effort may be impossible. What I hope to explain is why we should or should not love certain things.
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Research Paper Identify and discuss professional issues in education evident in a film or a piece of young people's literature in which a teacher plays a fairly cental role. This essay will critically analyse the discourses, positions and relationships, as well as certain individuals habitus' (after Bourdieu and Wac quant, 1992, cited in Gale & Densmore, 2000), which influence the classroom of ...
§ 1
Before I begin, however, I would like to draw a distinction between instrumental and intrinsic love. One reason why I suspect that discussions about love are so confusing is the oft-unacknowledged influence of Freud—we are used to thinking of love in sexual, and, therefore, usually instrumental terms. While this reading may be justified in some contexts, I think that one way to separate the two notions is to consider love of ideas or activities. This permits us to admit more than one type of desire (sexual) into our system, while allowing us to address interpersonal relationships once we shore up our intuitions in other cases. It can be argued, however, that even the love of ideas or activities is simply an instrumental satisfaction of, albeit more complicated, desires. While I am willing to admit that we may indeed fall in love for instrumental reasons, I do not think that this precludes the transformation of these motives into intrinsic ones.
This stance, of course, directly denies psychological hedonism, so I will briefly touch on that position in what follows. Subscribers to the psychological hedonist explanation of human motivation—who range from Kant to Freud—hold that all actions are done for pleasure. One might respond by pointing out that there seem to be many decisions—say, helping a friend at some cost to you—that are carried out altruistically. Such actions would be carried out for intrinsic reasons, independent of any value for one’s self. A psychological hedonist might respond, however, that this is impossible: all actions carry an instrumental value, even if it is only the agreeable feeling one gets from helping a friend. It is at this point, however, that their position begins to break down. If it true that altruistic deeds are really done for instrumental reasons, then we might imagine the following problem. Suppose we gave Nelson Mandela the option of having all the pleasure he got from freeing South Africa from apartheid without actually having to do it. He would probably not take up our offer. There seems to be something intrinsically valuable in Nelson Mandela’s actions, something that could not be satisfied if we simply gave him the instrumental pleasure. I think that love acts in a similar manner—while it is often instrumental, in some cases the beloved has an intrinsic value. Clearly the argument over psychological hedonism is an important one and deserves further treatment than that given here. But, as long as we accept that the beloved can be loved intrinsically, the argument I will present stands outside of an instrumental framework.
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Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, (1.4.89) Marcellus so wisely stated not knowing the precision behind his words. Various dialogue exchanged throughout the play discretely summarized events that took place. Horatio proved this point when he stated Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, of deaths put on by cunning and [forcd] cause, and in this ...
§ 2
Consider, then, the case of Eponine in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. In the course of the 1832 French uprising, Eponine finds herself behind a street barricade with her beloved, Marius. He, however, is in love with another character, Cossette, and asks Eponine to take a letter to her. Eponine, concerned with Marius’ happiness, not only delivers the letter, but also saves Cossette’s father from robbery. On her return to the barricade, however, she is shot and killed. The type of concern Eponine shows for Marius’ well being motivates Frankfurt’s notion of love: it is the desire to see the object of one’s affection flourish. In his scheme, love is a disinterested mode of caring—it must be “a concern in which the good of the beloved is desired for its own sake rather than for the sake of promoting any other interests.”3 For example, we might adjust our view of Eponine if we discovered that her concern toward Marius was motivated by money. Frankfurt’s position matches well with our intuitions that love affects the way we behave toward our beloved and changes how we order our own preferences. But does it tell us if we should love certain things? No—in fact, Frankfurt’s answer to his own question, “What makes it more suitable, then, for a person to make one object rather than another important to himself,” is, “It seems that it must be the fact that it is possible for him to care about the one and not about the other.”4 On this view, it is reason enough to care for something because we can care about it, never mind what it is.
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Implicit in this stance is that we ought not to consider whether something is worthy of our love, just whether we are able to care about it. I think Frankfurt designs his view to support the intuition that it is disingenuous for love to reflect worth, but that he does so to an extreme. While there seems to be something wrong with parents who love one of their children above the other based on intelligence, we want to be able to tell an abused wife that she should not go on loving her belligerent husband. If I fall in love with a serial killer or some dubious activity, is there a point at which we think that the object of my affection may not be worth my love? If we answer yes to Jefferson Airplane’s question, “Don’t you want somebody to love?” should we have a minimum criterion for possible candidates? Does Frankfurt’s view imply that, if I can love almost everything, I should love almost everything? These questions give us reason to suspect that Frankfurt has not accurately categorized love.
Susan Wolfe—in addressing these concerns—suggests that we can clarify Frankfurt’s position by carving out grounds for an objective evaluation of love. She argues that, while it may be difficult to address cases in the middle, we do have reason to tell people that, “they can do better,” in extreme circumstances. That is, “one’s love of a person or object or activity should be proportional to its value or worthiness to be loved. One should love that which is most deserving.” In the same way that teaching is presumably a better vocation than attempting to break the world record in long-distance spitting, there are sharply contrasting cases in which one person or activity is more worthy of our attentions than another. We should become worried if someone we know decides he loves Nazis or takes up sadism in his spare time. We should encourage him to develop a love of something more worthy. In cases in the middle, however, Wolfe’s argument begins to break down. If I enjoy an activity like running for its own sake while my best friend takes pleasure in golf, it does not make much sense for us to sit down and try to convince each other that one pursuit is better. In the same way, if I am interested in Garcia Marquez but my friend only reads Tolstoy, I lack grounds to tell him that my literary activities are more worthy than his. The same problem applies to the people we love: it does not make sense to say that I should value Hillary Clinton over my girlfriend because Hillary is smarter or more powerful, etc.
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Although Wolfe presents a compelling argument for adding normative features to our considerations of love, she is hindered in her efforts by the assumption that worth is wholly a quality of the desired object. She is too focused on avoiding the argument that there are objective standards for comparing things like intelligence to kindness or activities like running and golf. She does not want to assign a value to qualities or pursuits that cannot be normatively quantified. Wolfe would do better, however, to allow for subjectivity in the things people love, but argue for objectivity in telling people when they should or should not love something. This is precisely the position I intend to take; I will begin by arguing for the existence of subjective sense histories and continue my discussion with the notion of objective relational values.
§ 3
Psychologists often use the concept of sense pictures when referring to episodic memory. If, for example, during a vacation in Colorado, I listen to a certain song over and over again, hearing that tune months later will cause me to remember my time there. Flashbacks to traumatic events can be triggered by similar mechanisms—the smell of smoke may cause a person to remember a childhood house fire. In the same way that these sense pictures help create histories of events in our lives, we can imagine relationships with other people that create sense histories.5 Consider the case of the title character in Mario Llosa’s The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, who is reminded of his wife every time he smells lavender. Is it possible that the connection exists in the opposite direction, so that every time he thinks of his wife he also remembers the smell of lavender? Almost certainly, but to extend the analogy further, is it plausible that Don Rigoberto can be reminded of specific events when he thinks of his wife? The answer, at least for Llosa, is yes. When we think of people who have particularly influenced our lives, we are reminded of the occasions when they did so, for good or for ill. The sum of these events explains why we feel the way we do toward specific individuals. But how can the notion of sense history clarify why we should or should not love certain things?
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I think that the first issue that sense history must address is that some histories make us hate other people or events and some leave us indifferent. Returning to the case of the house fire, it is unlikely that the person suffering from flashbacks associates smoke with an enjoyable event in her past. Rather, she goes out of her way to avoid such sensations. In the same way, we may associate a particular location with a person we despise and take pains to steer clear of the area. We also have momentary relationships with things and people all the time, but do not have any particular like or dislike for them. It seems, then, that sense histories cannot help us with love since they can be positive, negative, or even neutral occurrences. This is not, however, an insurmountable problem.
We seem to have an intuition that, if two people fall in love, they must have a good history together—they recall agreeable events when thinking of each other. This is why it does not make sense to say that I should love Hillary Clinton over my girlfriend—Hillary has not dated me for the last two years, we have not shared walks on the beach, and we have not even met. In short, I should love my girlfriend because we have a good sense history together while Hillary and I have a fairly indifferent one. Sense history can also help us sort out the case of running versus golf. While we may not be able to decide whether running is objectively better than golf, we can say that my history with the former should make me more inclined to love it than the latter. It may be the case that running has been a source of stress relief while golf causes it or I may have met my girlfriend at a race and not on the driving range. The same applies to Garcia Marquez and Tolstoy—there is a set of sense histories that makes me more favorable toward Latin American literature than Russian.
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This is why love seems to be selective—we look for certain characteristics in our beloved, qualities expressed and felt when we examine our sense history with that person or activity. Wolfe’s discussion of a normative standard for these traits, however, can only take us so far. Part of the gray area she cannot address is the case of two people who love each other’s most immoral qualities. We cannot tell either one that they could do better, since they seem to have found what they want in the other person. For example, we may not like what Bonnie and Clyde saw in each other, but, as long as they had a mutually favorable sense history, we could still say they were in love. To further expand this notion, let us return to the case of the battered wife. Under Frankfurt’s definition, we found no way to tell her that she should not continue to love her husband. Wolfe provides one reason why she ought to stop doing so: we should not love people who display immoral qualities, especially if we value moral traits. Does the notion of sense history provide us another? Yes—the occasions of abuse the battered woman suffers outweigh any positive events she can recall about her husband. We might want to say, “On balance, you no longer have a good history with this man and you should not expect to accumulate more good memories in the future. You have no reason to be in love with him.”
But what does sense history tell us about when we should love someone? The answer to this question seems to return us to the original problem: if you can have a good history with something, you should love it. This position, however, ought not be confused with Frankfurt’s. Sense history provides us a fact of the matter about why we should and do love certain people: Frankfurt’s view steers clear of such a notion. But have we answered the question presented at the beginning of the paper? I can think of one serious reason to answer no: cases of love at first sight. Love at first sight seems to indicate that sense history is not the main thing that decides why we should or should not love something, but a hint to what is; it is a clue to the existence of values that are objective, but also relational. Before I explore this new position, however, let me offer a discussion of the problem as I see it.
§ 4
Another Garcia Marquez work, Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane, presents the idea rather succinctly. When the narrator asks a woman whether she believes in love at first sight, she replies, “Of course. The other kinds are impossible.” Although this is a fairly extreme position, love without history is a psychological fact. Literature abounds with examples and, even if instances in real life are relatively rare, I think that any legitimate scheme must take love at first sight into consideration. I also suspect that this type of case offers an even clearer distinction between Frankfurt’s view and the one that I am laying out: love at first sight seems to be particularly selective as to whom it targets.
Let me begin my discussion with an example suggested to me by Nomy Arpaly: Nietzsche seems to have fallen in love with Spinoza the first time he read him. In some sense this event was linked with Nietzsche’s history. When he read Spinoza, Nietzsche may have felt that he was a similar person to him and that they had comparable perspectives on life, resulting in a feeling of affinity. Although Nietzsche did not have a previous sense history with Spinoza, after reading him, he may have felt that the potential existed for a good one. Another set of factors, however, lurks in the background: Nietzsche was often lonely and felt constantly misunderstood. If he did not have these particular characteristics, he would not have reacted so strongly to Spinoza. The conclusion we should draw from Nietzsche’s case seems to be that, while history is an important component of why we should or should not love someone, it is not the underlying cause. The main component of love is objective relational values. These values explain why the things that satisfy desires in me do not do so in other people. Objective relational values indicate why I should love my girlfriend and not Hillary Clinton—they explain why I may find a particular sense history good while others are indifferent or hostile toward the same event. So what do objective relational values entail?
Thus far we have seen that there are two types of explanations for why people fall in love: Frankfurt’s and Wolfe’s. The former identifies love’s reasons as necessarily subjective. If I can fall in love with someone because of his brown hair and green eyes or if I can love Harlequin romances, I should, never mind what anyone else says. Wolfe’s objection to this treatment is that even if most reasons for loving something are subjective, some remain objective. To use one of her examples, it seems better to love Mother Theresa than a drug-dealing slumlord. Objective relational values, however, permit us to take a position somewhere in the middle. Frankfurt can have his subjective reasons to love someone—he has green eyes—while Wolfe can have her objective reasons—he is extremely intelligent—but a major part is objectively relational: he and I have had the same teachers; we have the same view on certain positions; we enjoy the same type of literature. All these reasons are objective: an outsider can see that they form a good sense history matching my desires, but they are also only grounds for me to love her. The key to objective relational values is that they are reasons why a certain person should love something, but are not explanations that may motivate anyone else.
I have reasons to like Steve Prefontaine more than Tiger Woods because Steve was a great distance runner, Tiger is a golfer, and I am a runner. My friend who spends most of his time on the driving range may have the opposite preference for good reason: his objective relational values lead him in a different direction. We would feel comfortable telling him that he has no reason to love Steve and I have no reason to love Tiger. Objective relational values can be linked to history, or they may not. If I am no good at physics, but I am passionate about philosophy, I have a reason to care about the latter regardless of any history I have with the former. Nietzsche reacted the way he did to Spinoza without any past history—all that was necessary was a specific set of conditions that led him to develop a passion for Spinoza.
§ 5
Before concluding, I would like to consider a criticism of objective relational values: the case of the battered wife. While Wolfe and the notion of sense history do provide answers to the problem, objective relational values may seem to follow Frankfurt’s position in avoiding it. Suppose that the battered wife in our example grew up in a family where she was constantly abused, but instead of rebelling against this environment, she came to derive her sense of value from being beaten. Let us also suppose that the abusing husband’s mother mistreated him as a child, and, as a consequence, he only felt satisfied when he turned that aggression against his wife. In short, what if we have a woman who needs a man to beat her, and a man who needs a woman to abuse? We seem to have a match made in objective relational heaven.
It is at this point, however, that the objective portion of the term must come into play. In the same way it is objectively true that watering a plant with ammonia will kill it, it is true that beating a human being will physically harm her. There is a fact of the matter that overrides any other concerns: we are in a position to know, in this case, what the battered wife desires better than she does or at least what she ought to desire. Herein lies the strength of objective relational values—they allow us to hold a subjective position in intermediate cases, but give us the strength of Wolfe’s claims in extreme situations. Objective relational values do give us a solution to the problem: we should feel confident telling the wife to stop loving her husband.
What I have attempted to establish in this paper is criterion for telling people why they should or should not love something. While Frankfurt’s position about the subjective nature of love is designed to reflect an important set of intuitions, it is too extreme. Surely some things are more or less worthy of our love than others. At the same time, however, I think that Wolfe’s response is too weak: we should be able to tell someone she should or should not love something in other than just extreme cases. The solution I have in mind falls somewhere in between the two. It is superficially characterized by the notion of sense history—if we want to tell someone they should not love something, we might point out that this object is not part of a good sense history.
This argument breaks down, however, when we look at the case of love at first sight. Sense history, as it turns out, merely points us in the right direction. The real solution to our problem lies in objective relational values. These values, which meet both Frankfurt’s and Wolfe’s criteria—yet are unique to individuals—form a set of necessary conditions for telling someone they should or should not love something. Returning to the case of Florentino Arzia and Fermina Daza, we can offer Fermina’s father a better way of deciding what to do about their love. If Florentino actually met Fermina’s objective relational desires, then he should have thought twice about sending her away. As it turns out, her father was right (at least initially) in suspecting that Fermina was not really in love. When reunited with Florentino, Fermina wonders what she was thinking and promptly marries another man. The two do, however, come back together later in life, perhaps because Fermina’s objective relational values changed, and she found love.
I would like to conclude with a brief discussion of a few types of love my view does not seem to cover. The first is God’s love. Assuming He exists, God is in a unique position with regard to history—since He is eternal, history has no meaning to Him, particularly the notion of a good or bad sense history. Furthermore, God would have little use for objective relational values, which are presumably facets of human and not divine psychology. This affords Him the opportunity to be indiscriminate with whom He loves, a view that seems to match well, as Frankfurt notes, with some accounts of God as love.6 We can also imagine instances of so-called unconditional love in which the lover expects nothing in return from the beloved. Although I think circumstances like this are rare if not impossible, we do not imagine that someone offering unconditional love has a desire for a good sense history. She is willing to put aside her particular relational values in exchange for the beloved’s. If this is true, it explains why hardly any examples exist: few people are willing to love—especially in an intrinsic rather than instrumental manner—without concern for their own expectations. Perhaps we should applaud those who can.
Finally, it seems like sense history can only take us so far when dealing with unrequited love. How should one react when, like Florentino, the object of one’s desires does not come to share a similar affection? One response may be to argue that, in some objective sense, the person in love is ideal for the beloved. This seems to me a bit heavy-handed: one of the reasons that the love may be unrequited in the first place is that one person has a different sense history than the other, or perhaps a different understanding of a shared sense event. In either case, we have better grounds to objectively argue that the love should indeed remain unrequited since there are no common, agreeable memories. The better response, then, would be to let time pass, for sense histories, our appreciation of past memories, and even our relational values often change as we grow older. Accordingly, we might expect that a once unrequited feeling might change into a mutually reciprocated love.
