Harry Frankfurt, Princeton Professor of Philosophy and author of The Reason for Love (more popularly, On Bullshit) says that it isn't that we have reasons for loving. Rather, it is simply that love gives us reasons. Cited as an analogy to the capitulation necessary for religious faith, this idea was brought forward by my "Philosophy of Religion" TA in discussion today. As pointed out also by John Cottingham in The Spiritual Dimension, Blaise Pascal--the famous 17th century mathematician and Catholic convert--also says, "La coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point." Or, in English, "The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know at all." Love amongst humans seems to be a very fitting metaphor for religion in this case because both require an openness and capitulation of the self into intellectually murky territory.
Before I begin, it's probably important to note what I mean by "love." Although I'm mostly talking about romantic love (for the sake of simplicity), I mean to include any sort of inexplicable love. True frienship, for example, would be included in this conception of "love" because we have some feeling of affinity for which we cannot completely explain. "Friends" who exist solely for some conscious purpose (e.g. helping with homework) obviously are excluded.
Independent of the religious arguments these claims about love and rationality were cited for, this idea of a primacy of love over rationality is an interesting one.* The argument made for the primacy of love is a compelling and heartfelt human one. The fact that love has been studied extensively in the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, etc. without any comprehensive or unifying theory can be seen as evidence that love somehow defies rational understanding. Even evolutionary biologists, who may argue that love is merely a set of chemical reactions in the brain that were bred into us as an evolutionary tool for survival of the species, can not possibly claim to understand the entirety of the emotion. After all, breaking it down into hormonal components--while potentially revealing about certain aspects of love or human nature--can never really encapsulate the entirety of the phenomenon.
Nevertheless, despite how resistant to rationality love may be, the body of work conducted around the phenomenon of love also shows how interested we are in coming to some sort of rational understanding of it. This impulse to provide an explantion grounded in reason of a fundamentally unreasonable feeling (or fundamentally complex feeling such that reason alone is insufficient in comprehending it) seems to be quite natural. While rationality may not be able to provide a definitive and fully comprehensive reason for love, it can certainly help us to better understand it and perhaps have a better awareness of our own love.
Can love, then, really transcend rationality, or have some sort of primacy over it? Or does rationality legitimately have a place in understanding and analyzing the phenomenon of love? Not to be cliché, but it seems like the answer is properly a combination of both. In a way, we can say that love transcends our rationality in that we can never understand our feelings of love when internal to the system, i.e. when we are loving. To put it another way, we don't (rationally, at least) choose who or what we love. But to say that love is completely independent of rationality would also be absurd, although this rationality can likely only serve as an agent of reflection, and no more. Rationality dictating love seems to entirely defeat the purpose and circumvent the definition of love. However, this claim doesn't seem to invalidate the intellectual effort spent on understanding, as Queen would call it, this "crazy little thing called love."
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*Cottingham argues for the primacy of praxis, or religious practice as a way of having religious faith without sacrificing rationality. That argument doesn't seem to really apply in the same way to love. We are then, therefore, left with the the primacy of either love or rationality, and unlikely both. [See Ch.1 of The Spiritual Dimension.]
what about the simple account that we "love" those that are genetically adaptive for us to love.
ReplyDeletei.e.
we tend to love attractive people who indicate they have a higher likelihood of successful reproduction
we tend to love our family because they share our genes
we tend to love our friends when we feel that it's advantageous to have the survival protection of a group
etc.
this is a perfectly rational understanding.
I think the evolutionary psychology approach to love is a bit of a stretch from Darwin. I think your point is kind of what Darwin is trying to drive at in "Descent of Man," but that theory seems not to have as much support as his theory of natural selection. Deterministic reasons explaining human nature seem to be insufficient in truly understanding humanity, insofar as we are far more complex than the principles you have cited. Perhaps there is a statistical correlation, but I don't think they give a complete picture, hence this incomprehensible "love," as an unconscious way we follow these principles...
ReplyDeleteOK, you're right that the evolutionary psych position doesn't sufficiently capture "love" in a unifying way. but i bring it up because it's a rational understanding. my bottom line is that i disagree with the premise of your argument - that the current lack of a unifying theory of "love" implies that love is probably rationally incomprehensible.
ReplyDeletemy first point of contention is that you're making the big presumption that "love" is a singular thing. another account is that love is a suitcase word used to describe a whole bunch of similar, but ultimately distinct phenomena. by the account i've just described, a unifying theory neither exists nor is necessary to rationally understand all these different phenomena and how they work.
but even if you believe that "love" is really a singular sort of thing, the absence of a unified theory still doesn't mean that love can't be rationally understood. i'd like to draw an analogy to physics. for decades, everyone's been trying to find a grand unified theory of everything. despite tons of searching, no one's been able to come up with one yet, and some have questioned the possibility of humans finding one. but no one's making the conclusion that this means there must be something metaphysically irrational about physics. in fact, we understand all the constituents of a grand unified theory of physics - mechanics, quantum stuff, etc. - quite well in rational, well-defined ways, so it still seems that physics is a rational study.
likewise, love has all sorts of enclosed, rational accounts made by chemists, cognitive neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists, theologians, philosophers, etc. The absence of a unifying theory known to humans doesn't imply metaphysically irrationality.