Can One Promise to Love Another?

Abstract

The question in my title suggests a fairly well-known background or familiar antithesis. A natural first move is to acknowledge that there is a long tradition, both linguistic and social, of making such promises. People do in fact say 'I promise to love, honour and obey', and make such promises in church or wherever: imperatives are issued like 'This commandment I give you, that ye one another', and people undertake to obey such commandments. The second move, perhaps most obvious in the more romantic approach to marriage and sexual at least, involves wielding a fairly sharp axe between deeds and feelings: echoing Jane Austen's words 'We can command our actions, but not our affections'. Thus someone will say 'If by love you refer solely to a set of actions-for instance, being sexually faithful to one partner-then of course one can promise this, since that is under the control of the will: if you include affections, then of course one cannot promise this, since affections overtake one or disappear willy-nilly'. There is thus a kind of paradox or at least an unresolved issue here, since it is tolerably clear that the notion of cannot be cashed out purely in terms of actions, nor is it so cashed out in the tradition of promise-making. Any attempt to suggest that the Christian ideal of love, for instance, includes only deeds and omits affections altogether must surely fail. This is in fact only one instance of the paradox: for there are many cases in which imperatives-'Fear not!', 'Don't be angry with me!', 'Keep calm!' and so on-are issued, and in which people may promise (whether advisedly or not) to follow these injunctions; yet we still cling to the idea that our affections cannot be commanded. One way of trying to resolve the paradox involves the suggestion that our affections are in fact under the control of the will, if often in rather indirect or roundabout ways. Iris Murdoch for instance, in The Sovereignty of Good, makes considerable play with the idea of attention: by attending properly to what other people are really like, and trying to see them under favourable descriptions ('amusing' or 'fresh' rather than 'brash' or 'naive', for example), we may come to feel differently about them. As is well known, emotions may be changed by changing the