Reasons Of Love Research Articles

Happiness in Classical Confucianism: Xúnzǐ

This essay contributes to comparative inquiry concerning happiness through a case study of Xunzǐ, a major Confucian thinker. Xunzǐ’s ethical theory presents values and norms that fill the role of happiness indirectly, through the ideal figure of the gentleman. However, his working conception of psychological happiness and individual well-being turns on aesthetic values that go beyond the universal prudential values to which his ethical theory appeals. Hence I argue that his implicit conception of happiness actually revolves around a way of life grounded in what Susan Wolf has called “reasons of love.”

Love and Equal Value

This essay offers a way to avoid a clash between reasons of love and reasons of ethics that stems from a difference in the conception of the moral value of people. In moralities of lovers, the loved ones are due to be accorded a value superior to that of other people, whereas in ethics there is an inescapable presumption that people have a value that is equal among them. The usual way to avoid this clash has been either to make room in the ethical arsenal for reasons relating to particular agents, agent-relative reasons, or to acknowledge that love-grounded reasons legitimately compete with ethical reasons and that we need a method of negotiating them. Both escapes have serious problems. The essay proposes a third way. The first step is to reshape the notion of ’love,’ in a direction where important characteristics of our common understanding are kept, notably the loved ones’ uniqueness and incomparability, while the characteristic that is problematic in the present context would be eliminated, namely the you-and-me character of love that gives rise to reasons that are wholly personal and partial. The second step is to show how such a reformed notion of love coheres with the assumption of equal value. And the third step is, through this connection, to change our understanding of love as reason-giving, from generating reason directly to generating reason indirectly. This involves a shift of focus from reason to meta-reason, viz. that which makes our system of, or competence for, normative reasons reasonable. The advantage of the proposed solution would not only be that clash between reasons of love and reasons of ethics is avoided, but also that ethical reasons are seen as underpinned by love, which moreover offers the best ultimate explanation of them.

Concerning Self-Love

In The Reasons of Love, Harry Frankfurt proposes a philosophical account of love according to which there are four necessary conditions for the occurrence of love. We may ask reasonable questions about these four conditions: (1) Is each condition adequately analytically defined? (2) Is each condition plausibly a necessary condition for love, and has Frankfurt defended their necessity with good arguments? (3) Are all four conditions consistent with each other? And (4) if the four conditions are only necessary, and hence tell us only when love is absent, what must be added to Frankfurt’s account which would tell us, just as importantly, when love is present? In this essay I address these questions, although some more than others, especially in trying to understand Frankfurt’s claims about “self-love.” It emerges from this investigation that Frankfurt’s central metaethical thesis, which he has been advancing for three decades—that caring about or loving something logically precedes valuing it, and hence that we cannot have value-mentioning reasons for loving something or someone—starts to fall apart.

Review Essay on The Reasons of Love*

Review Essay on <i>The Reasons of Love</i>*

The Reasons of Love

The Reasons of Love

Peace, Poetry, and Negation

Peace, Poetry, and Negation‡ Robert Pinsky (bio) A Buddhist foundation in Korea invited poets from around the world to gather for a conference on peace in the summer of 2005. The undertaking seemed less quixotic and more practical after I learned a little about the figure from whom the Manhae Foundation takes its name. In Manhae (born Han Yong-un), Koreans can celebrate a great modernist poet who is also a central figure in Korean religion, culture, and politics. An American poet reads with some astonishment that Manhae, a monk and religious reformer who profoundly influenced Buddhist thought and practice, was also a co-author of the Korean Declaration of Independence. Accomplishments comparable to those of Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, achieved by someone born in 1879 (the same year as the American businessman-poet Wallace Stevens). This unusual, comprehensive centrality of Manhae may tempt even Western poets to feel some tiny glint of reflected glory. It also intimidates us: what can one offer in the context of such an imposing model? At that gathering in Seoul, where poets from around the world were invited to think about the somewhat vague ideal of peace, the challenge was perhaps the more poignant for [End Page 395] those of us representing languages that have had no Manhae, no single figure who so thoroughly included the worlds of art and practical politics. That occasion, and the writing of Manhae, inspired the questions I will try to consider here. On a grand scale, what is the place of poetry in the needy world, where a deficiency of peace for much of the population means hunger, violence, and disease? On an immediate, personal scale, what might be the social or religious or political place of the next poem one writes, in relation to the formidable accomplishment of Manhae in a language and culture we can only begin to understand? In the context of such questions, and the diffidence they inspire, it is a great relief to turn toward Manhae's poems. These poems present not the political rhetoric of triumph, but intricacies of doubt; and not the religious rhetoric of peace achieved, but peace as the goal of struggle; not salvation, but longing. Far from separating individual psychology from politics or religion, the poems seem determined to blur, or even wipe away, any such distinctions. And it appears to be a poetry that attacks its own means, that sometimes creates an image or a metaphor only to tear at the creation. Here is Francisca Cho's translation of the poem "Cuckoo": The cuckoo cries its heart out.It cries and when it can cry no more,It cries blood.The bitterness of parting is not yours alone.I cannot cry even though I want to.I'm not a cuckoo, and that bitterness can't be helped either.The heartless cuckoo:I have nowhere to return, and yet it cries,"Better turn back, better turn back." Regret, exile, discomfort: these feelings, whether they are understood as personal, erotic, historical, or all of the above, here dramatize themselves by how the poem expels its own notions: [End Page 396] "I'm not a cuckoo," "I have nowhere to return," "I cannot cry." These negatives are like the legend of the bird that grieves till it emits not a voice, but blood. "I haven't seen your heart," says the refrain of a poem called "Your Heart." "Don't," says the refrain of "First Kiss." "It's not for nothing that I love you," says "Love's Reasons." Even a poem of devotion has the refrain "Don't Doubt": "If you doubt me, then your error of doubt / and my fault of sorrow will cancel each other." There are negatives, too, in a poem called "Don't Go": "That's not the light of compassion from Buddha's brow; it's the flash from a demon's eyes / That's not the goddess of love who binds body and mind, and tosses herself into love's ocean, caring nothing for crowns, glory or death; / It's the smile of the knife." The refrain of "Don't Go" is "Turn around-don't go to...

The Reasons of Love

The Reasons of Love

The Reasons of Love

The Reasons of Love

Speaking in Tongues

Humea KVIlW Oppenheimer continuedfrom previous page momentous if perhaps expected questions—what is this horror to be called? how is it to be named?—with an eerie simplicity: The haze united us and the wrinkles on our faces became outlined as in greasepaint in that red dustso we left our city, and the cloud settled on the far shore, and the people there had no need of names. As Nurkse's adroit phrases suggest, the strength of this poem, and indeed of his impressive book, finds its full freedom through a naming-anguish, often abandoning what he elsewhere affirms, to wit: Eliot's own conviction, as expressed in Four Quartets, that the right revealing names can always be found, even for the vilest of experiences, and most valuably as a means by which to objectify if not constrain their vileness. No right name seems available for the vileness ofthis terrorist attack, or for terrorism—in much the same way as "holocaust," though not without its journalistic uses, shudders under the weight of its grisly inadequacy: a stronger term, such as "evil," might provide a greater, if temporary relief. Nurkse'spowers as apoet can be seen topourforth most tellingly in his treatment ofthe horrifying attacks on New York's World Trade Center. One result of this book's struggle with naming is that its last "suite," which presents a thematic shift, becomes a revelation. We find ourselves here descending into the ocean and lost among chattering sea creatures. At first, the descent feels simply implausible—what is one to make of whispering eels, grieving lugworms?—and, from the viewpoint of naming, confusing. Yet this only at first. We soon adapt to a new quasi-scientific dimension, and greco-latinate terms of classification begin to take over, competing with Four Quartets'?, implicit liturgical latinates. What is more, the exchange begins to feel right: chaetognath stands in for glass worm, acmaeidae for limpet: the experience satisfies. In the end, indeed, it seems a solid, brilliant reminder, as does Burnt Island itself, that the anguish of finding apt names for our experiences remains among the chief, ifprecarious, sources of redemption in an age of ferocious, ambushing attacks and apprehensive populations. Paul Oppenheimer is the author ofthree books ofpoetry , including most recently The Flame Charts: new poems (Spuyten Duyvil), and a biography, Rubens: A Portrait (Cooper Square Press). Speaking in Tongues Charles Marowitz On Bullshit Harry G. Frankfurt Princeton University Press http://pup.princeton.edu/ 76 pages; cloth, $9.95 It is always intriguing when an intellectual highbrow, setting aside weightier matters, takes himself down a few pegs to consider more mundane topics: Aldous Huxley on "Canned Fish," Walter Benjamin on "Hashish in Marseilles," Roland Barthes on "Striptease." Harry G. Frankfurt is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University; not quite in the league of Huxley, Benjamin, or Barthes but a renowned moral philosopher and the author of books such as The Reasons ofLove (2004), Necessity, Volition , and Love (1999), and The Importance of What We Care About (1988). In his latest short work, he has been tempted into a much more earthbound subject; namely, "Bullshit"—a subject about which many of us have ardent, profound, often divided opinions. If fish, hashish, and strippers can be philosophically analyzed, there is no reason in the world to deny finite consideration of a pastime that affects virtually every member of the human race, either as receiver or dispenser. In the first part of his treatise, Frankfurt tries to formulate a definition we can all live with. He compares "bullshit" with "humbug," stating that "both lying and humbug are modes of misrepresentation " but qualifies the similarity by declaring that "humbug" falls "short of lying." "Humbug," in the Dickensian, Ebenizer Scrooge-sense of the word, is also a "mocking" ofcertain values the speaker either disdains or refutes. It can be used interchangeably with "bullshit" when used to denigrate ideas with which people violently disagree. But throughout, Frankfurt evaluates "humbug" only in terms of fraudulent language rather than attitude. A person denouncing an idea with which he disagrees is as much the result of character-differences as it is semantics. Without considering specifically what is being called "humbug," it is...

Review of The Reasons of Love, by Harry G. Frankfurt

Review of The Reasons of Love, by Harry G. Frankfurt