Philosophers on Love III

Emotional Theory of Love
We have seen that the robust concern view and the value bestowal view both have their own problems. We may perhaps consider another view of love. It is a view that considers love as essentially emotional in character, "emotions" being  understood as "responses to the beloved which involve evaluation, motivation, and a kind of
phenomenology of feeling". If so, many philosophers think that love is essentially an emotion e.g. R Wollheim, (The Thread of Life, 1984), A O Rorty,  “Introduction”, in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, 1980 1-8 and “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds”, in Badhwar 1993, 73–88.), R Brown,  Analyzing Love (1987), D W Hamlyn, “The Phenomena of Love and Hate”, in Soble's  Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love,1989, 218–234., A C Baier,  “Unsafe Loves” in R C Solomon & K M Higgins  (eds.), The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love 1991, 433–50, and Badhwar “Love”, in H. LaFollette (ed.), Practical Ethics (2003). Thus, Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says: "It would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to make. If love and hate are not emotions, what is?"

According to Rorty (Explaining Emotions 1980), the problem with this view is that philosophers may be using the word "emotion" as meaning different kinds of mental states and there does not appear to be agreement on what that " homogeneous
collection of mental states" may be. So various theories claiming that love is an emotion may mean very different things. Helm therefore divides such philosophical views into two classes: 
1. those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational
response to an object (whether such response be merely occurrent or dispositional 
and 
2. those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions.

Love as Emotion Proper
To Helm, an "emotion proper"  is "a kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”. He explains. Emotions are generally understood to have several
components. The "target" of an emotion is "that at which the emotion is directed" e.g. if I am afraid or angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this evaluation, (the formal object) is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type ( e.g attraction, fear, anger, disappointment, joy, sadness etc). If I fear you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous. In being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. In addition, emotions also motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by moving me to avoid the danger) and a-rationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of
anger). More, emotions may also have a certain phenomenological "feel" to them though exactly how to describe such a characteristic emotional  “feel” and how such a feel may be related to the evaluational and motivational component of love is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel are imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do.

What do we mean when we say that love is an emotion proper?
To R Brown ( Analyzing Love, 1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal bodily changes caused by the agent's evaluation or appraisal of some object or situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” . In love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities”( historical and relational) that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time (pp. 106–7). Such  qualities are evaluated in love as worthwhile i.e. love's formal object is evaluated as being worthwhile as a person. But Brown resists being any more specific than this perhaps to preserve love's open-endedness. D W Hamlyn's  views ( “The Phenomena of Love and Hate”,in Soble (1989, 228) are or less the same: "With love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object] which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the other emotions". To him, love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” that is presupposed by all other emotions. Helm is unhappy with both such definitions. In Hamlyn's case, he says that love is a too generic pro-attitude, instead of being a specifically personal attitude. In Brown's case, evaluating object of love as a worthwhile person "fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect". Helm thinks that their account of love as an emotion fails to enrich the concept of emotion itself. He says, "It is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so.

Love as an emotional complex

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love. She merely focuses on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” , like love, involving both emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity: “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object” (p. 73). Love
is viewed not just as our emotional state vis-a-vis our beloved at a specific moment in time. It can only be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover's being permanently
transformed by the beloved.

A C Baier ( “Unsafe Loves”, in Solomon & Higgins (eds.),  The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love 1991, 444) shares Rorty's historical view of love: "Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional inter-dependence". e.g. I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds but Baier insists that love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442): the relevant emotional interdependence between lovers also involves making appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved e.g a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved's temporary bafflement, and amusement at her embarrassment. "The idea is that in a loving relationship your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is that you feel these emotions “tenderly". Moreover, you ought to respond emotionally to your beloved's emotional responses to you e.g feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you. Such cut and thrust of mutual emotional attentiveness and responsiveness fosters a very special kind of intimate emotional inter-dependence between lovers.

Badhwar (“Love”, in H. LaFollette (ed.), Practical Ethics,  2003, p. 46) views love as a matter of “one's overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”. Such an emotional orientation may have a certain “character structure.”, something she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional] affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake” (p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved's well-being. This "look of love" also provides the beloved a reliable testimony of  the quality of the beloved's character and actions (p. 57).

To Helm, there is "something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state that can simply come and go.". The complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one's emotional responsiveness to one's beloved—a pattern that also projects into the future. This view of love as a complex unfolding in the history of dynamic constant mutual emotional evaluation and response between lovers brings out the "depth" of love and also help to elucidate complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure at the presence of one's beloved, yet it can at other
times involve frustration, exasperation, anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the relationships it fosters.

Not only does love involve us in responding to the emotional response of our lover, the love relationship may actually help us grow and develop into a more complex and more fully formed human being. In the course of the history of the relevant emotional
interdependence, the loving relationship may actually transform us as a person and thus alter our identity! To Helm, it is partly Rorty's point (1986/1993) in focusing on the historicity of love  She thinks that an important feature of such historicity is that
love is “dynamically permeable”: the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person's character” (p. 77)."Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other." Rorty thus thinks that  love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. However dynamic permeability does not necessarily guarantee that the relevant loving relationship will continue because nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that the characteristic narrative history project into the future. Such dynamic permeability can as likely lead to the dissolution of the love e.g when one party changes but the other remains unresponsive to such new changes in the attitude, conduct and personality of her lover. To Helm, "love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love." The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by M Nussbaum (“Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration”, in Love's Knowledge:
Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 1990  314–34.), says Helm. .

To Helm, the "emotion complex" view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, is thus superior to the other views because by articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it may help explain the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and because these
emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing to specify a single formal object of love.

But there are still other problems: we need a much more explicit account  of  what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? e.g. what connects my amusement at my beloved's embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love?It may depend upon the specific history of the specific kind of love relationship forged between the two lovers such that some form of intimacy may allow for tender teasing responses to each other whilst other love relationships may not. To Helm "the historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the pattern constitutive of love and which do not." but she thinks this answer inadequate. She argues that not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship. " We we need a principled way of distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is characteristic of love?"


B W Helm (“Love, Identification, and the Emotions”, American Philosophical Quarterly,2009 46:39–59.) tries to answer some these questions by treating love as intimate identification. "To love another is to care about him as the particular person he is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values. Insofar as a
person's (structured) set of values—his sense of the kind of life worth his living—constitutes his identity as a person, such sharing of values amounts to sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of love", he says. But such sharing of values is for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist). Emotions not only have a target and a formal object (as indicated above) but also
a focus:(a background object the subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the target is made intelligible) e.g if I am afraid of the approaching
hailstorm, I evaluate it as dangerous by observing the way that hailstorm bears on the vegetable garden I care about and focus on that garden as the object of my fear but  emotions usually come in series with a common focus e.g fearing the hailstorm may be associated to such emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly or feeling disappointed or sad when it does not, being angry at the rabbits for killing the spinach, being delighted at the productivity of the tomato plants, etc. Helm argues
that what he calls "a projectible pattern" of such emotions with a common focus
constitute caring about that focus. He analyzes some emotions as person-focused emotions e.g pride and shame focusing on various relevant target persons. Emotions are implicitly evaluated in terms how they may affect the target person's quality of life. A pattern of such emotions focused on myself and subfocused on my role of mother, for example, may involve caring about and evaluating how acting as a mother may affect the kind of life I find worth living and this in turn may affect my identity as a person; to care in this way is to value being a mother as a part of my concern for my own identity. Likewise, to  form "a projectible pattern" of such emotions focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to value this as a part of my concern for his identity—to value it for his sake. Love is thus such a sharing of
the beloved values for his sake, involving trust, respect, and affection and intimate
identification with him. This account of love is grounded in caring for the beloved and caring about what he cares about, his interest, concerns and fate. Through the relevant intimate emotional identification, it makes room for the intuitive “depth” of love. 

The Value and Justification of Love
The 6 million dollar question is: why do we love?
Any account of love which fails to address this question must be considered inadequate. Do we love our beloved for certain qualities and properties she possesses or do we love her because she is what she is?

To Helm, we love our beloved because our beloved is not fungible: no one could simply take her place without loss but different theories may approach these questions differently. However, the question of justification is primary. What do we get out of a loving relationship?

Aristotle thinks that having loving relationships may promotes self-knowledge insofar as our beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting our character back to us (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). To Helm, "this answer presupposes that we cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at least more objective than otherwise." But D O Brink (“Eudaimonism, Love and Friendship, and Political Community”, Social Philosophy & Policy, 1999 16:252–289. pp. 264–65) argues that if our aim is not just to know our selves better but to improve ourselves, we ought also to interact with others who are not just like ourselves because interacting with such different personalities may give us new ideas on how to live in various different ways and enable us to better assess the relative merits of our existing ways of life and thus open up new possibilities of further development. Helm advises us not to take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally. He says, "rather, our beloved can reflect our selves not through their inherent similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls the “epistemic significance” of love."

H LaFollette ( Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality, 1996 Cap 5) however, suggests several other reasons why it is good to love: love increases our sense of well-being, elevates our sense of self-worth, and serves to develop our character.

Helm thinks that love also tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. M A Friedman (What Are Friends For? Feminist
Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory,1993) argues that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” (p. 61). R C Solomon ( About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times 1988, p. 155)  claims that " Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” because in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me. To Helm, what counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation Besides he thinks that such answers are general and does not taker into account specific  relationships e.g questions like what, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person and not someone else and why I should continue to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

We learn earlier that Velleman (1999) thinks we can answer the first question by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature but does not have any answer for latter questions. E Telfer (“Friendship”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1970-71 71:223–41)  Friedman (1993); Singer (The Pursuit of Love 1994) all claim that no justification can be given and L Thomas also rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another's love or insist that an individual's love for another is irrational” (“Reasons for Loving”, in Solomon & Higgins 1991, 467–476), p. 474) because  "no matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although the person has not changed."(471).

LaFollette (1996, p. 63) does not agree. He says "reason is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an internal power, integral to who we are.…Reason does not command that we love anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we love them." We may not have any compellable reason to love or to cease to love someone but that does not mean we have no reasons at all to love or to cease to love another. The reason why we love another may be a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To Helm, such questions may be answered by asking why our beloveds are fungible. Given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons, to reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are. However in Plato and Aristotle accounts of love, they think that love is a kind of knowledge and we love people for the properties they possess and we are to love people only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Vlastos  notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds as particular types of persons instead of them as persons (“The Individual as Object of Love in Plato”, in Platonic Studies, 1981  3–42, 2nd edn. ). He argues consequently that in doing so they fail to distinguish “disinterested affection for the person we love” from “appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person” (p. 33).

To Helm, This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Thus Helm think that it is "surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, that “if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along too, of course”.

The final question about the worth of the beloved is her fungibility or irreplaceability (whether or not she is replaceable by another object or person without any material loss in her value). Is the object of love fungible? Can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss?

If we love our beloved because she has certain properties, we do not love her as the individual that she is but only as a person instantiating those properties. This would mean any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well. If so, my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person may exhibit the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does. If so, then I may have good reason to “trade up” or to switch my love to the new, better person. However, to Helm, the objects of our loves are not fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible. To justify this, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love he endorses: "The intention in love is to form a we and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one's fortunes in large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in the form of your own extended self." [p. 78] In trading up, we betray and destroy an inalienable part of our self in the form it has since taken in the shape one's extended or enlarged joint selves. My identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” so that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another.

Badhwar (2003) disagrees with  Nozick, saying that Nozick's view implies that once I love my beloved, I cannot abandon that beloved no matter what that beloved has become as a person. This she says is more an addition than love. (p.61). Instead, Badhwar (1987) prefers her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one's own. On this view, insofar as my love is disinterested (not a means to antecedent ends of my own), it would be senseless to think that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends equally well or better and in this sense, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. But this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. The problem of fungibility arises not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like this, Badhwar (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice)Soble's (1990, Chapter 13) views are similar. But still Badhwar argues that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63) ie. we experience our beloveds to
be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Helm thinks that love can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we love, not another whom we also love,for our loves are qualitatively different. But why is this, he asks? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Mary is, for example, that Amy is funny but Mary is not. I love Amy
in part for her humor, and I love Mary for other reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility of trading up: if Mary were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump Amy and spend all my time with Mary?

Whiting (1991) argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy on the question of the object of love. He opines that having disinterested affection for someone (for her sake rather than my own) involves essentially an appreciation of her excellences as
such and it is in part her excellences which constitute her identity as the person that she is. It is thus illegitimate to separate a person's qualities or excellences from that person as a whole. So even if I have disinterested affection for my beloved as a person, I have implicitly also included therein my selfish affection for her excellences or qualities.  The person, therefore, really is the object of love.

Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between the object of one's love, which of course is the person, and the grounds of the love, which are her properties. To say, as Solomon does, that we love someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of the person. Thus, Whiting's rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy  can be read as saying that what makes my attitude one of  disinterested affection  (ie. one of love) for the beloved is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for than affection. Implicit in Whiting's account is an understanding of the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with. It is she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she suffers and whom I seek to comfort, etc. This addresses the first worry, but not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so whether or not I have reason to “trade up.” To explain why I like Amy and not Mary, both Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship e.g Whiting claims that although there may be a relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer why I love only one of them rather than another that person within this pool, once I have come to love Amy and so have developed a historical relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7).

Similarly, Delaney claims that love is Amy in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love Amy rather than switching allegiances and loving Mary. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of Amy is intended to provide an answer to the third question above and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible. To Helm, "there seems to be something very much right with this response: relationships grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the beloved." But it is still unclear how the historical-relational properties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to our first question  by appeal to the excellences of the beloved's character (cf. Brink
1999). The mere fact that I have loved her in the past does not seem to justify my continuing to love her in the future. When we imagine that she is going through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love for her, why shouldn’t I dump her and instead come to love someone new having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively  (unless the change she undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person she was), we think I should not dump her, but Helm says, the appeal to the mere fact that I loved her in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational properties could do the trick remains an open question. For an interesting attempt at an answer, Helm urges us to see Kolodny 2003)

To conclude, Helm says : "In part the trouble here arises from tacit preconceptions concerning the nature of justification. If we attempt to justify a love in terms of particular historical facts about the relationship, then it seems like we are appealing to merely idiosyncratic and subjective properties, which might explain but cannot justify love. This seems to imply that justification in general requires the appeal to general,
objective properties that others might share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Solving the problem, it might therefore seem, requires somehow overcoming this preconception concerning justification—a task which no one has attempted in the
literature on love.". Love is never easy. Not even, or should I say, particularly, for philosophers! Whatever the truth may be, I hope Helm has helped us realize at least where some of the trouble spots in our journey to love may be lying in wait for us.