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... ely better than golf, we can say that my history with the former should make me more inclined to love it than the latter. It may be the case that running has been a source of stress relief while golf causes it or I may have met my girlfriend at a race and not on the driving range. The same applies to Garcia Marquez and Tolstoy there is a set of sense histories that makes me more favorable toward Latin American literature than Russian.
This is why love seems to be selective we look for certain characteristics in our beloved, qualities expressed and felt when we examine our sense history with that person or activity. Wolfe's discussion of a normative standard for these traits, however, can only take us so far. Part of the gray area she cannot address is the case of two people who love each others most immoral qualities. We cannot tell either one that they could do better, since they seem to have found what they want in the other person. For example, we may not like what Bonnie and Clyde saw in each other, but, as long as they had a mutually favorable sense history, we could still say they were in love.
To further expand this notion, let us return to the case of the battered wife. Under Frankfurt's definition, we found no way to tell her that she should not continue to love her husband. Wolfe provides one reason why she ought to stop doing so: we should not love people who display immoral qualities, especially if we value moral traits. Does the notion of sense history provide us another? Yesthe occasions of abuse the battered woman suffers outweigh any positive events she can recall about her husband. We might want to say, On balance, you no longer have a good history with this man and you should not expect to accumulate more good memories in the future.
You have no reason to be in love with him. But what does sense history tell us about when we should love someone? The answer to this question seems to return us to the original problem: if you can have a good history with something, you should love it. This position, however, ought not be confused with Frankfurt's. Sense history provides us a fact of the matter about why we should and do love certain people: Frankfurt's view steers clear of such a notion. But have we answered the question presented at the beginning of the paper?
I can think of one serious reason to answer no: cases of love at first sight. Love at first sight seems to indicate that sense history is not the main thing that decides why we should or should not love something, but a hint to what is; it is a clue to the existence of values that are objective, but also relational. Before I explore this new position, however, let me offer a discussion of the problem as I see it. 4 Another Garcia Marquez work, Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane, presents the idea rather succinctly. When the narrator asks a woman whether she believes in love at first sight, she replies, Of course. The other kinds are impossible.
Although this is a fairly extreme position, love without history is a psychological fact. Literature abounds with examples and, even if instances in real life are relatively rare, I think that any legitimate scheme must take love at first sight into consideration. I also suspect that this type of case offers an even clearer distinction between Frankfurt's view and the one that I am laying out: love at first sight seems to be particularly selective as to whom it targets. Let me begin my discussion with an example suggested to me by Not Apply: Nietzsche seems to have fallen in love with Spinoza the first time he read him. In some sense this event was linked with Nietzsche's history.
When he read Spinoza, Nietzsche may have felt that he was a similar person to him and that they had comparable perspectives on life, resulting in a feeling of affinity. Although Nietzsche did not have a previous sense history with Spinoza, after reading him, he may have felt that the potential existed for a good one. Another set of factors, however, lurks in the background: Nietzsche was often lonely and felt constantly misunderstood. If he did not have these particular characteristics, he would not have reacted so strongly to Spinoza. The conclusion we should draw from Nietzsche's case seems to be that, while history is an important component of why we should or should not love someone, it is not the underlying cause. The main component of love is objective relational values.
These values explain why the things that satisfy desires in me do not do so in other people. Objective relational values indicate why I should love my girlfriend and not Hillary Clinton they explain why I may find a particular sense history good while others are indifferent or hostile toward the same event. So what do objective relational values entail? Thus far we have seen that there are two types of explanations for why people fall in love: Frankfurt's and Wolfe's. The former identifies loves reasons as necessarily subjective. If I can fall in love with someone because of his brown hair and green eyes or if I can love Harlequin romances, I should, never mind what anyone else says.
Wolfe's objection to this treatment is that even if most reasons for loving something are subjective, some remain objective. To use one of her examples, it seems better to love Mother Theresa than a drug-dealing slumlord. Objective relational values, however, permit us to take a position somewhere in the middle. Frankfurt can have his subjective reasons to love someone he has green eyes while Wolfe can have her objective reasons he is extremely intelligent but a major part is objectively relational: he and I have had the same teachers; we have the same view on certain positions; we enjoy the same type of literature. All these reasons are objective: an outsider can see that they form a good sense history matching my desires, but they are also only grounds for me to love her. The key to objective relational values is that they are reasons why a certain person should love something, but are not explanations that may motivate anyone else.
I have reasons to like Steve Pre fontaine more than Tiger Woods because Steve was a great distance runner, Tiger is a golfer, and I am a runner. My friend who spends most of his time on the driving range may have the opposite preference for good reason: his objective relational values lead him in a different direction. We would feel comfortable telling him that he has no reason to love Steve and I have no reason to love Tiger. Objective relational values can be linked to history, or they may not. If I am no good at physics, but I am passionate about philosophy, I have a reason to care about the latter regardless of any history I have with the former.
Nietzsche reacted the way he did to Spinoza without any past history all that was necessary was a specific set of conditions that led him to develop a passion for Spinoza. 5 Before concluding, I would like to consider a criticism of objective relational values: the case of the battered wife. While Wolfe and the notion of sense history do provide answers to the problem, objective relational values may seem to follow Frankfurt's position in avoiding it. Suppose that the battered wife in our example grew up in a family where she was constantly abused, but instead of rebelling against this environment, she came to derive her sense of value from being beaten. Let us also suppose that the abusing husbands mother mistreated him as a child, and, as a consequence, he only felt satisfied when he turned that aggression against his wife. In short, what if we have a woman who needs a man to beat her, and a man who needs a woman to abuse?
We seem to have a match made in objective relational heaven. It is at this point, however, that the objective portion of the term must come into play. In the same way it is objectively true that watering a plant with ammonia will kill it, it is true that beating a human being will physically harm her. There is a fact of the matter that overrides any other concerns: we are in a position to know, in this case, what the battered wife desires better than she does or at least what she ought to desire. Herein lies the strength of objective relational values they allow us to hold a subjective position in intermediate cases, but give us the strength of Wolfe's claims in extreme situations. Objective relational values do give us a solution to the problem: we should feel confident telling the wife to stop loving her husband.
What I have attempted to establish in this paper is criterion for telling people why they should or should not love something. While Frankfurt's position about the subjective nature of love is designed to reflect an important set of intuitions, it is too extreme. Surely some things are more or less worthy of our love than others. At the same time, however, I think that Wolfe's response is too weak: we should be able to tell someone she should or should not love something in other than just extreme cases. The solution I have in mind falls somewhere in between the two. It is superficially characterized by the notion of sense history we want to tell someone they should not love something, we might point out that this object is not part of a good sense history.
This argument breaks down, however, when we look at the case of love at first sight. Sense history, as it turns out, merely points us in the right direction. The real solution to our problem lies in objective relational values. These values, which meet both Frankfurt's and Wolfe's criteria yet are unique to individuals form a set of necessary conditions for telling someone they should or should not love something. Returning to the case of Florentino Area and Fermina Data, we can offer Fermina's father a better way of deciding what to do about their love. If Florentino actually met Fermina's objective relational desires, then he should have thought twice about sending her away.
As it turns out, her father was right (at least initially) in suspecting that Fermina was not really in love. When reunited with Florentino, Fermina wonders what she was thinking and promptly marries another man. The two do, however, come back together later in life, perhaps because Fermina's objective relational values changed, and she found love. I would like to conclude with a brief discussion of a few types of love my view does not seem to cover. The first is Gods love. Assuming He exists, God is in a unique position with regard to history since He is eternal, history has no meaning to Him, particularly the notion of a good or bad sense history.
Furthermore, God would have little use for objective relational values, which are presumably facets of human and not divine psychology. This affords Him the opportunity to be indiscriminate with whom He loves, a view that seems to match well, as Frankfurt notes, with some accounts of God as love. 6 We can also imagine instances of so-called unconditional love in which the lover expects nothing in return from the beloved. Although I think circumstances like this are rare if not impossible, we do not imagine that someone offering unconditional love has a desire for a good sense history. She is willing to put aside her particular relational values in exchange for the beloveds. If this is true, it explains why hardly any examples exist: few people are willing to love especially in an intrinsic rather than instrumental manner without concern for their own expectations. Perhaps we should applaud those who can.
Finally, it seems like sense history can only take us so far when dealing with unrequited love. How should one react when, like Florentino, the object of ones desires does not come to share a similar affection? One response may be to argue that, in some objective sense, the person in love is ideal for the beloved. This seems to me a bit heavy-handed: one of the reasons that the love may be unrequited in the first place is that one person has a different sense history than the other, or perhaps a different understanding of a shared sense event.
In either case, we have better grounds to objectively argue that the love should indeed remain unrequited since there are no common, agreeable memories. The better response, then, would be to let time pass, for sense histories, our appreciation of past memories, and even our relational values often change as we grow older. Accordingly, we might expect that a once unrequited feeling might change into a mutually reciprocated love.
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Research essay sample on Love At First Sight Fall In Love
