Customer Reviews

The Reasons of Love

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This short, beautifully written book by Henry Frankfurt, Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University, is based upon lectures Frankfurt delivered in 2000 and 2001 titled "Some Thoughts about Norms, Love, and the Goals of Life." In his book, Frankfurt argues that love and the ability to love give meaning to a person's life and that the purest form of love is, ultimately self-love. By 'love', Professor Frankfurt does not mean romantic love. Rather, he characterizes love as 1. disinterested, 2.personal, 3. involving the self-identification of the lover with the beloved and 4. constraining one's action -- a person loves someone or something because he or she can't help doing so.

Frankfurt's book consists of three short chapters. The first chapter, "The Question: How shall we Live?" argues that caring and love, rather than moral behavior, gives meaning to a life and define a person's basic commitments and goals. Professor Frankfurt is not a rationalistic philosopher who extolls the power of reason to set goals. Rather, I think Frankfurt sees love as a matter of an existential commitment -- a person can't help loving what he or she loves. Love is not a question of thinking things through to conclude which subjects and persons merit one's care and concern.

The second chapter "On Love and its Reason" elaborates on the opening chapter and offers the four-fold definition of love I have summarized above. Frankfurt points out that the loves of a person define what that person is and give his or her life goals and meaning. What a person loves is prior to reasoning about one's choices, as evidenced, for Frankfurt, by one of the purest and most common forms of love, the love of a parent for his or her young children. In love, ends and means intersect, in that actions taken in furtherance of the interest of the beloved become themselves final goals rather than only insturmental goals.

In the final chapter, "The Dear Self", Frankfurt argues that the purest form of love is ultimately self-love, rejecting critiques of self-love by philosophers such as Kant. In this chapter, I think, Frankfurt basically equates self-love with self-knowledge. A person who loves himself, for Frankfurt, knows his own mind, knows what he wants and cherishes, and pursues it wholeheartedly without ambivalence. Most people don't know what they want and are plagued by competing goals which restrict severely their ability to love wholeheartedly. Franfurt characterizes such behavior as showing an inability to fully love oneself. In addition to Kant, Frankfurt in this chapter makes insightful references to St Augustine, Kierkegaard, and especially Spinoza. Frankfurt distinguishes again between morality and love as establishing the contours of a meaningful human life. For Frankfurt, a person can love someone or something wholeheartedly and yet be immoral. In addition to the philosophers Frankfurt mentions, I think there are many parallels to existential thought, especially that of Heidegger, behind Frankfurt's lucid and restrained prose.

This book will appeal to thoughtful readers who want to reflect upon and try to understand their lives and what matters to them. It shows that philosophy remains a meaningful, life-giving endeavor rather than the sterile, academic exercise seen by philosophy's detractors.

Robin Friedman

This is essentially a book on the nature of practical reason. Frankfurt's central claim is that "the origins of normativity do not lie... either in the transient incitements of personal feeling and desire [as some Humeans would have it], or in the severely anonymous requirements of eternal reason [as some Kantians would have it]. They lie in the contingent necessities of love." In other words, love is "the ultimate ground of practical rationality." The title reflects Frankfurt's main ambition, which is to identify and analyze the type of reasons for action provided by love. On the way to this goal, Frankfurt raises some difficult and important questions: How important is moral theory to the theory of practical reason? How important are moral values to the age-old question of how we should live? What is the nature of love? How does it differ from things like romantic attraction? If practical reason is grounded in love, does that mean that practical reason is essentially selfish? He also provides some fascinating answers--some of which are more elaborately defended than others. To give some examples: He argues, as he has before, that morality is in a sense overrated--at least by theorists of practical reason. Moral concerns and values do not always express what is most important to us; therefore, morality is not always the most important source of reasons for action. He also claims that love is characterized by four essential features. It manifests a disinterested concern for the beloved; it is "ineluctably personal"; it involves identification with the beloved; and it imposes constraints upon the will. Surprisingly, Frankfurt argues that the purest (though not necessarily most admirable or valuable) form of love is self-love. He then goes on to argue that once we properly distinguish self-love from self-indulgence we'll be able to see that self-love is not a form of selfishness. So to ground practical reason in love is decidedly not to explain all deliberation in terms of self-centred calculation.

There are moments when it gets a little precious for my tastes, but Frankfurt's work is undeniably honest and deep. It seems driven by a genuine and earnest desire to figure things out--to say something clear, helpful, and even beautiful about things that matter to us. His prose is refreshingly jargon-free. It is certainly a work of analytic philosophy, but he distinguishes himself from many contemporary philosophers by refusing to limit himself to discussions carried on in the latest journals. This means that technical terminology is kept to a minimum, and there is virtually no name-dropping. A reader familiar with the literature in contemporary ethics and practical reason will get more out of this than a novice. But it is a virtue of Frankfurt's work (not just in this book) that anyone sufficiently curious about these matters could read and profit from it. He refers to classic authors such as Aristotle, Kant, St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, and Spinoza. But nothing he writes assumes that the reader already knows their work.

The book clearly furthers an ongoing project. For years Frankfurt has argued that freedom of the will consists in having the will one wants, and that this requires being able to wholeheartedly identify with some desires rather than others. "The Reasons of Love" continues his efforts to elaborate on and justify that basic idea. This comes out most clearly in the last half of the last chapter, where Frankfurt explains how true self-love accomplishes the "wholehearted identification" that is necessary for the "volitional unity" that enables perons to achieve the kind of freedom that's worth having. The discussion here will resonate most with readers of his other works--particularly the numerous essays on identification, caring, volitional necessity, and autonomy.

That should not scare off the uninitiated. On the contrary: just about anyone inclined to ask themselves hard questions about freedom, love, reason, and the nature of the self is likely to find reading Harry Frankfurt deeply rewarding. He's careful and precise without being technical or overly-dry. More important, he never loses sight of the stuff most of us actually care about. My sense is that those unfamiliar with Frankfurt's work will find in "The Reasons of Love" a great place to start reading one of the most interesting and important philosophers writing today.

The prose of Mr. Frankfurt is in this book as terse, concise and understandable as in previous works ("taking us seriously and getting it right", "on truth"), which does not mean hastily construed, as it is evident from the density of information and the carefulness of the choice of words that he has given long thoughts on the subject he reflects upon. So, as stated in the title of this review, it is delightful to read his essays in general, and this one in particular, which have the added benefit of not being cluttered with countless quotes and references, as so many philosphers today feel compelled to do (a vice specially conspicuous in European thinkers). There are a few of those quotes and references (St. Augustine and Bernard WIlliams come to mind), but always relevant and well serving the purpose of illuminating the main line of argument, instead of calling our attention to the erudition of the author.
As for the content, that's the dispiriting fact, as the central thesis of the book is that traditional rationalist philosphies have got it wrong in trying to identify normative reasons that would authoritatively dictate how we should act (and, by extension, how we should live). As he states brilliantly in section 10 of the first chapter, to be able to ascertain the validity of those reasons of how to live we should have previously agreed on what kind of live is (objectively) valuable to pursue, so the whole argument suffers from an unavoidable circularity that makes the intent of finding those reasons (or answer the question they seek to settle rationally) necessarily bound to fail. We'll come back later to the implications of that inability of reason to help us determine the ultimate ends of our lives (which is not in itself original). Mr. Frankfurt contends in the rest of the book that asking for the ultimate reasons to live is getting the causality backwards, as instead of having reasons to care for things as ends in themselves what we find ourselves with is objects of our interests that we care about (being love the higher degree of caring that can exist) which in turn, because of them being important to us, give us reason to act in a certain way.
All of that is well and good, and in line with some emotivist descrptions of normativity that can trace it's origins back to Hume (if not further, as it can be argued that Epicurus already held similar views four centuries BC).
The more orignal part of the book is developed in the third chapter, where Mr. Frankfurt argues that the higher form of love, and a precondition for truly loving anything (thus truly caring about, and because of that, truly having reasons to act in certain ways) is self-love. I'm afraid I found this part less persuasive than the rest, as the self-love it postulates ends up seeming to be little more than a contrivance to justify having a reason to care for something in the first place (as both from stoic and buddhist stances it could be argued that it would be better for men not to love anything, as it causes us to be attached to things over which we have no control).
A final word about the consequences of assuming the inability of a universal (or objective, or even intersubjective) reason to provide us with the ultimate ends we should pursue: if that were the case (and I repeat that Mr. Frankfurt book makes one of the best laid out arguments I've read so far for it) it would be impossible to adjudicate between competing claims made by different individuals, as each could defend those claims by stating they were acting in the best interest of what they most deeply care about, and those inerest would be incommensurable. So for example, we would have no rational argument to defend that loving a racial minority (and thus acting to improve their lot in life) is morally superior to hating that same minority (and thus working to extermiante it, as hate could be construed as a love for the disappearance of that particular group). The members of the Frankfurt school (so called because of the German city that originally hosted the Institute of Social Studies with which most of them were associated, nothing to do with the author we are considering here) are just one example of thinkers who, after denouncing the inability of the scientific-technical (or instrumental, or sujective) reason to provide us with ultimate ends, spelled out the need for practical philosophy (or ethics) to devote its energy to that quest (the quest for a rationality that had something to say about our ultimate ends, the ends that are not means to attain anything else). If that quest is doomed, ethic is impossible, and moral discourse is irrelevant.
Although Mr. Frankfurt admonishes us in his final paragraph to bear that irrelevance with good humour, and his brilliant book gives us much to think about, all I can say is that I still do not find the overall description of our human condition satisfactory, although of course that goes well beyond the opinion that this very fine piece of work deserves.

The decision by the author to (typically) dismiss romantic love as a defective mode of loving and to look instead to parent-young children relations and ultimately the nature of self love strikes this reader as depressing. Love that is freely chosen, freely renewed, and yet optimally persistent through nearly endless variation should I thought have engaged Prof. Frankfurt rather than incurred his suspicions as to its legitimacy. My fascination with agape, Frankfurt's major focus, extends slightly less than that with lawn darts. This almost certainly has to do with my understanding of the notion of agapistic love, drilled home by the Jesuits, as "love for x _in spite of_ x's nature." Outside of the peculiar case of the divine "regard" for man this threatens to deteriorate into mere patronization. On that note and following through rather naturally, since we are going to look so carefully at parent-infant relations as instances of love in its purest human form, perhaps some discussion of parent-adult child relations might have been in order. I mention the last in a desperate effort to take the focus off of a strangely (rather than acceptably) selfish spin on supposedly disinterested concern for another (as if _that_ inspires the beloved anyway) that strikes this reader as infecting Frankfurt's work on love generally speaking. Nice tip at the end to always maintain one's sense of humour.

There is of course a rather obvious Spinozistic spin we can put on the treatment of love in this text. (1) We cannot help but love what we love. (2) Insofar as we are confused concerning what we love (which is to say either we think we love what we do not love or we do not know what we love), we are in some sense estranged from ourselves, possibly even unfree. So (3) We should do our best to figure out what it is that we cannot help but love and subsequently wholeheartedly devote ourselves to loving it; in this way we arrive at a certain sort of psychological concord, even perhaps the highest form of freedom attainable by man. This connects up with Prof. Frankfurt's historical interest in/endorsement of a specific sort of compatibilism and may well be appealing to those who find solace in the project of "becoming what one is" (Ecce Homo).

I don't have academic training on philosophy argument and thus the book becomes a long and winding essay that is difficult to grasp. You can read the first chapter from http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/titles/7749.html and see if this is the kind of books you would like.

I have reservations writing this review, because Frankfurt's "pop-philosophy" is receiving a wide readership, and that fact is indeed very valuable.

Frankfurt's style is clear; his ideas crystalline, his jargon minimal; his issues important. His advice often salient. But I cannot help but describe three of his books as "thin." Perhaps, this "thinness" is deliberate, to reach a larger mass audience. So, a trade-off requires I hedge my review.

I'll use one example of the "problems" I have with this level of thinness. I cannot imagine a competent, rigorous philosopher writing, "that question can be sensibly asked only on the basis of of a prior answer to the factual question of what he actually does cares about" (ROL, 26). This sentence can be read in several different ways, one in which the answer to a factual question precedes its ability to be valued. This reading is quite fine.

An alternative reading is that our values (what we care about) can only be determined by the facts in the decision. That's untrue. Other readings are also suggested, including a rush to "facts establish our values that are useful facts." These (mis)readings are problematic, and since this possibility of misreading confronts the reader frequently, more from sentential ambiguity than intent, it may be worth a "red flag."

The is/ought distinction, also known as the fact/value divide and the naturalistic fallacy, came into philosophical consciousness in the mid-18th century (David Hume). A minority of philosophers deny the divide, or deny its importance, and yet that does not seem to be Frankfurt's view. Yet, he frequently blurs, even if he does not cross, the epistemic/axiological divide.

Is this really important? That, too, is debated. Those of us who want to preserve the divide do so, not because it is critical to Frankfurt's theses, per se, but because it obscures his thesis. Factual questions are answered true/false, whereas values questions are answered good/bad (right/wrong). Surely, we don't need people confusing true for right, false for wrong (false in the sense of "not the case").

Catholicism's Natural Law Theory does precisely this, due to Aquinas' conflation of Aristotle's natural teleology with Aristotle's practical instrumental action, the former determined by a theoretical syllogism, the latter by a practical syllogism, and in Catholicism triangulated into a perverse "moral theory." And its objections to contraception, abortion, homosexuality, masturbation, etc., are all built on this fallacy.

Nature offers no guidance to how we must act, or whether those facts are of any value. Nature just "is." A fact. We may value that fact for some reason, but the fact is not itself the value, or vice versa. We impute the values. Ask a tsunami victim if Nature is morally good. It's incoherent. An auto accident is a fact. We determine how to value it (good for minimal damage, bad for death and destruction, because "harm" is something we find good to avoid, not because the fact is that value). We may use facts in our valuations, and I believe this is Frankfurt's meaning here.

With reservations like these, offset by the appeal of readers turning to philosophy for insights into their lives, I want to retain the assessment of "thinness," but I am reminded that babies cut their teeth on soft food before they tear into meat. Frankfurt is very good first food to introduce the value of philosophy, and why it might matter (a value, not a fact). But careful distinctions are also of value.