Readings
Texts
- Shulamith Firestone, "Love: A Feminist Critique" (from last time)
- Robert Nozick, "Love's Bond" (pdf)
- Annette Baier, "Unsafe Loves" (pdf)
Reading Quiz Questions
- What is Firestone's theory of love?
- How does Firestone argue that it is impossible for men to love in a patriarchy?
- What is Nozick's concept of the 'we'?
- What is Nozick's theory of love?
Synopsis
We began today by clarifying Firestone's account so as to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were.
Firestone is challenging, in part because she makes some rather dramatic claims (men can't love!). There is also a tone of anger or stridency in her writings which can be quite off-putting, if wholly understandable given the context and time in which she was writing.
That is, and as I suggested in our last class, I think it is important to understand 1) the context in which Firestone is writing--viz., a deeply sexist American culture of the 1960's and 70's, and 2) that her more extraordinary claims about love in a sexist and patriarchal culture must be distinguished from her account of love. It is her account of love, of course, that most interests us.
To be in love, for Firestone, is to be in a state of total mutual vulnerability. We come to love, she says, out of self-interest. We want the protection, comfort, and nurturing others can provide. We want, in short, their virtues to belong to us. When reciprocated, the upshot is that we find ourselves in a state of interpersonal dependency and mutual reliance. Yet this is purely and simply mutual vulnerability: The lover can harm the beloved like no other, and vice versa. It might not be hyperbole to think of it as a kind of Mutually Assured Destruction, the explicit policy designed to keep the U.S. and the Soviets from obliterating the world in a nuclear holocaust during the cold war.
Firestone has no objection to loving in her sense. (Although we might object to her account for much the same reason I objected to Singer's account: At best she's identified a necessary condition on love, but she hasn't told us anything about what love is. We'll pursue more on this next time.)
Now, for Firestone, to love and be loved is simply to be in a state of mutual vulnerability. So conceived, however, love goes completely wrong in a patriarchy. Since men enjoy all the economic and social power, women only come to love as a way of gaining some economic status and protection--protection which is always at the whim of the man to whom she must prostrate (prostitute?) herself. Thus she can never be her true self: She must always be whomever she thinks her 'beloved' wants her to be. The story is not much better for men, since men are taught to fear and reject vulnerability by their mothers' original (freudian) betrayal and so cannot, and need not, allow themselves to love in a patriarchy.
Whatever we might make of Firestone's understanding of just how love is (mis)expressed in our culture, it is nonetheless important to bear in mind that her account of love in terms of mutual vulnerability is distinct from her account of how love goes wrong in our culture, even if the former is used to explain the latter. As I suggested, there may be quite a lot more to her account than first meets the eye.
In considering Firestone's account of love, however, we found that it was fairly easy to construct counter-examples to the thought that mutual vulnerability suffices for love, but much, much harder when it comes to proposition that mutual vulnerability is a necessary condition on love. So it may be that Firestone is on the right track at least insofar as we are, indeed, vulnerable to those we love.
Turning next to Nozick, we examined how he construes love not as mutual vulnerability (Firestone's account) but as the extension of mutual welfare between two people to create a third 'person', or a we. That is, love is not defined by the injury one person can do to another in love per se, but by the extension of one's welfare in such a way that the good that happens to one's beloved is good for the lover, while the harm that befalls the beloved harms the lover. Thus it follows from Nozick's account that love results in a state of mutual vulnerability, but not for the reasons Firestone imagines. Lovers are vulnerable to their beloveds not because their beloveds can take advantage or abuse them but because the lover has extended his or her welfare to include the beloved's welfare. Thus injury to the beloved injures the lover as surely as if the lover has been injured. On the other hand, the achievements of the beloved are the lover's achievements, and the good the beloved does or is done them is likewise a good for the lover.
Being in a state of extended mutual welfare creates, Nozick thinks, a new person. What then is a person? The concept of a person is at once extremely important (persons have rights and obligations non-persons don't) and unbelievably difficult to pin down. I won't say its impossible to find a defensible account of personhood, because it may be that there is one we just haven't discovered as yet, despite some of the most brilliant minds in philosophy having earnestly studied it for thousands of years now.
I should put together a handout on this, but suffice it for now to say that the usual things we might identify as persons, bodies and minds, won't do. If you want to find out more about this fascinating topic, we will take it up later this Spring in Minds and Machines and, sometimes, in my Introduction to Philosophy courses.
In any case, Nozick's presupposition that a sufficient condition on personhood is having a shared welfare is at least as plausible, or not, as any other account. That's as close to a philosophical shrug as one can come, of course, since we just don't know what a person is.
It bears reminding ourselves, however, that Nozick's account has one clear advantage: It renders Aristophanes' insights in such a way that a whole is made from halves in loving, but constructed over time, not found as a superficial reading of Aristophanes would otherwise suggest. It is such an engaging and inspiring notion that students frequently find Nozick's account compelling.
Next time we will take up criticisms of Nozick's account.