The Structure of Love

385 Pages·1990·17.747 MB·English

by  Soble, Alan

T H E S T R U C T U R E O F L O V E
Yale University Press
New Haven & London
T H E
S T R U C T U R E
L o v e
A L A N S O B L E
Copyright 0 1990 by Yale University. All rights resewed. This book may
not be reproduced, in whole or in part, includmg illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by sections 107 and 108 of the C.S.
Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.
The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint from the following
copyrighted works: Excerpt from "Sonnet 43" from 100 Love Sonnets by
Pablo Neruda. Copyright O Pablo Neruda 1959 and Fundacion Pablo
Neruda. Excerpt from "Sonnet #24" from Benyman's Sonnets by John
Berryman. Copyright 0 1952, 1967, by John Berryman. Reprinted by
permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., and of Faber and Faber Ltd.
The last six lines from "For Anne Gregory" by William Butler Yeats are
reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company from The
Poem of W.B . Yeats: A New Edition, edited by hchard J. Finneran.
Copyright 0 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1961 by
Bertha Georgie Yeats.
Designed by Nancy Ovedovitz and set in Galliard type by the Composing
Room of Michigan. Printed in the United States of America by Book
Crafters, Inc., Chelsea, Michigan.
YALE
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Soble, Alan,
The structure of love I Alan Soble.
p. cm.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-300-04566-2 (alk. paper)
1. Love. I. Title.
89-16571
CIP
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of
the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council
on Library Resources.
For Morn and Dad (and Nunches)
C O N T E N T S
1. Two Views of Love, 1
Love Ostensively Defined. Property-Based and Reason-
Dependent Love. Object-Centric and Subject-Centric
Loves. The Two Traditions. Derivative Features of
Love. The Human Love for God. Reconciling Eros and
Agape. Mill's Dedication.
2. Love at Second Sight, 31
Gellner's Paradox. Knowledge and Love at First Sight.
The Impossibility of Love. Nongeneral Love-Reasons.
The Substitution Problem.
3. The Uniqueness of the Beloved, 48
A Strange Music Lover. Counterfactual Meetings.
Defending Uniqueness. Shared History. Dynamic
Love. Metaphysical Uniqueness. Uniqueness and
Exclusivity.
4. Coming First, 68
The Democratization of Love. Why Primacy Must Fail.
5. Arirtophanic Love, 78
Aristophanes' Myth. The Structure of Aristophanic
Love. The First Generation. Later Generations.
Matching the Lover's Nature.
...
viii Contents
6. The Sat.factirm $Desire, 91
The Missing Link. Implications of the Model. Giving in
Order to Get. A Nonnative Concept. The Roles of
Desire in Love.
7. Hate, Luve, and Rationality, 107
The Erosic Emotions. Hate at First Sight. Explanations
and Justifications. Irrational Love. Love as an
Anomalous Emotion. A Euthyphro Problem. Loving the
Unlovable. Distinguishing Love from Hate.
8. Defending and Refining Erosic Love, 138
Love Without Any Sights. The Indescribable Beloved.
Love and Self-Respect. Love and Will. Ex Post Facto
Reasons. Destroying Love. Reasons Not to Love.
Conditional Unconditionality.
9. Exclusivity, 169
Two Notions of Exclusivity. Difficulties in Multiple
Loves. The Lover's Self-Concept. Joint Interests.
Intimacy and Exclusivity. Exclusive Triads. Erosic
Exclusivity. The Desire for Exclusivity. Agapic
Exclusivity. Loving Properties. Sexual Exclusivity.
10. Constancy, 203
A New Paradox. Varieties of Constancy. Defending a
Doctrine of Constancy. Love for the Person. Loving for
Identity Properties. Types of Properties. Agapic
Constancy.
1 1. Reciprocity, 237
Defining Reciprocity. Defending the Doctrine of
Reciprocity. The Desire for Reciprocity. Convolutions.
Mutuality. Reciprocity and Constancy. Erosic and
Agapic Reciprocity.
12. Concern and the Mmality of Love, 257
Hoolung Humbert. Self-Love. Egocentric Philia? Love
and Sacrifice. Carte Blanche Concern. Good in Whose
Sense? Identifying with the Beloved. Special Concern.
Love, Justice, and Morality.
Contents ix
13. The Object ofLove, 286
The Blonde's Complaint. Nonfungible Attachment.
Phenomenological Irreplaceability. Irreplaceability by
Individuation. Loving the 'Whole" Person. Loving
Love. Persons as Properties. Persons Are Not
Properties. Endmg a Regress. Small Causes.
Notes, 321
Bibliography, 357
P R E F A C E
An ancient philosopher has said that, if a man were to record accurately all of
his experiences, then he would be, without knowing a word of the subject, a
philosopher. I have now for a long time lived in close association with the
community of the betrothed. Such a relationship ought then to bear some
fruit. I have considered gathering all the material into a book, entitled:
Contributwn to the Themy ofthe Kiss.
-Swen Kierkegaard
In the final pages of Pmnography, I asked whether photographs and films
could represent and communicate the lovingness, if any, of sexual acts. More
than a year after I began to write The Structure of Lope, I noticed that I had
finished P&wBraphy by discussing love, and I wondered whether love's being
the final topic in a book devoted to sexuality was an unconscious sign of my
true interests or prejudices. But many books develop, either coincidentally or
intentionally, the author's final thoughts in an immediately preceding book.
Discussing love, even briefly, in a book on sexuality and sexual images is hardly
surprising; subsequently writing a treatise on love is scarcely more so. That I
have turned my attention to love (in a book that barely mentions sexuality)
does not indicate that I think the theoretical problems in sexuality have been
solved. It does show that concerns with the nature and significance oflove have
replaced concerns with sexuality in my intellectual life. The investigation of
one set of social or scientific problems is often temporarily suspended, or
permanently abandoned, even though they have not been solved, in favor of
another set, for all sorts of reasons. The new questions may be more exciting
because they are fresh and relatively unexamined, or because they are of more
general interest, or because they present themselves as more urgent or merely
as more manageable.
In the introductory note to his anthology Pr$mes and Prologues to Fa-
mow Booh, Charles Eliot proclaims a commonsensical view of the purpose of a
book's preface: "No part of a book is so intimate as the Preface. Here, after the
long labor of the work is over, the author descends from his platform, and
speaks with his reader as man to man, disclosing his hopes and fears, seeking
sympathy for his difi~ulties."T~h is view is by now discredited. The preface is
very much part of the whole text, and the author can at best pretend to put
aside his or her dictatorial tone. There are, of course, difficulties I could talk
about here, but most are too mundane for print. The major intellectual obsta-
cle I encountered was organizational: the concepts that surround love form a
complex web, which makes dividing topics and issues into neat packages a
constant headache. The final architecture of the book is, I think, adequate, but
the reader will understand why I employ frequent cross-references. (Cross-
references include chapter and section numbers; for example, "8.3" refers to
chap. 8, sect. 3.) The major personal difficulties I encountered are just that:
personal. I will say only that a scholarly life devoted to the philosophy of
sexuality elicits reactions from people that are by now routinely predictable;
what was amazing was that writing about love, instead, hardly changes mat-
ters. Imagine a psychologist testing his latest idea in bed with a beloved during
their postcoital conversation: "The most strllung distinction between the erot-
ic life of antiquity and our own, liebchen, no doubt lies in the fact that the
ancients laid the stress upon the instinct itself, whereas we emphasize its object.
The ancients glorified the instinct and were prepared on its account to honor
even an inferior object; while we, including you and I, liebliche, despise the
instinctual activity in itself, and find excuses for it only in the merits of the
object."2 Liebchen must want to clobber, and not for the historical error about
the Greeks.
Nevertheless, the perceptive or ingenious psychoanalyst should be able
to read between the lines of my text to ferret out hidden details of my life-at
least according to Peter Gay: "No matter how abstract or apparently rational
their system, philosophers of love inevitably import their own erotic history
into their the~rizing."If~ K ierkegaard is right, further, I should not even try to
avoid exposing my life in the pages of The Structure oflove; a genuine philoso-
phy of love would be a jargonless diary of my experiences with my betrothed.
Some tiny details of my life, I admit, do infect the text, but I'll bet a dollar to a
donut that no one will recognize them. They are too universal. (Or they will be
recognized, but without curiosity, because they are universal.) Against Gay's
charge I am of course defenseless. I am less worried, however, about an ana-
lyst's discerning anal-compulsiveness in my philosophical method or my te-
dious literature review than I am about a pundit reviewer's calling this book
The Love of Structure.
I do not offer a grand theory of love, or of anything else, in this book.
What the reader will find is detailed scrutiny of various claims that people
(philosophers and others) make about love, of the logical relations among
these claims, and of the arguments that are or could be used to defend them.4
As a result, the book contains many small contributions to our understanding
of love, tiny conclusions about its rationality and morality. The major ques-
tions concern the basis or ground of love (that is, its structure), the nature of
what is loved, the roles of desires and beliefs in love, and whether love permits
justifications as well as explanations. If my approach seems to slight love as a
feeling, so be it; I will let the poets describe the inner phenomenology of love.
Analytic philosophy (in the broad sense) speaks to a different ear, the ear that
welcomes sustained logical probing of our beliefs and their grounds. My goal
is to stimulate the reader into thinking more carefully about the nature and
value of love. Hence, the book will neither help x catch and keep y nor inspire
happy faces to smile into the void. Much of the book, I fear, will seem terribly
dry on first reading. (Indeed, on first writing many of its sentences seemed to
me as dry as sentences about love could be.) But when reread, these dry
sentences reveal breathing truths about love. Like some beloveds, these sen-
tences require perseverance to change them into vital beings.
I wish to thank many people for their help on this project. Most impor-
tant are the people who labored, day in and day out, to do essential things:
Jeannie Shapley, who typed the manuscript; and Jessie Hedman, Debbie
Guidry (later Anderson), and Huey Henoumont, who ran to and through the
library and photocopied until their eyes turned green. My colleagues in the
Department of Philosophy, especially Edward Johnson, Norton Nelkin, and
Carolyn Morillo, did everything that good colleagues are supposed to do,
and then some. Many others contributed in various ways: teaching me Kierke-
gaard, reading chapters in progress, discussing tangles, corresponding at
length about disagreements, sending me to books and articles. I appreciate the
efforts of Cdine Leon, Robert Perkins, Stephen Evans, Sylvia Walsh, Roma
Burger, Russell Vannoy, Irving Singer, James Nelson, Hilde Robinson,
Neera Badhwar, Ursula Huemer, Stef Jones, Diane Michelfelder, Mark Fish-
er, Jean Braucher, and Nancy Muller. Jeanne Ferris, at Yale University Press,
encouraged the project from the very beginning, and manuscript editor Karen
Gangel did her job superbly in the face of my insufferability. A special word of
thanks to Szabo SPra for her uplifting correspondence. My students as well as
those attending presentations of sections of the book (at the Central Division
meetings of the American Philosophical Association, April 1985; at Saint
John's University, October 1985; at the UNO Philosophy Club, October
1986; and at four Tulane University Philosophy Research Seminars, 1987
through 1989) asked questions and made comments that improved my think-
ing on many issues.
The congenial people who work in the following establishments took
some interest in my writing and did not rush me out: in New Orleans, Tastee