"Reason and Love"

Harry G. Frankfurt is professor emeritus at Princeton University. This book "Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting it Right" includes the Tanner Lectures that he gave in 2004 at Standford University, and a series of comments written by other distinguished philosophers on Frankfurt's lectures. In these two lectures, Frankfurt explores the roles of two motivating forces in our lives: reason and love.

"Love is paradigmatically personal" is a quote that I will not forget in a hurry. Frankfurt clearly articulates his position on human nature and the nature of human rationality, arguing that the most fundamental of all our dispositions should be the confidence in the limitations and promise of our own will, of love and then on the edifice of practical rationality that the authority of love brings about.

Must read.

Taking Ourselves Seriously and Getting It Right is composed of a series of lectures by Harry G. Frankfurt, given at Stanford University and commented by a panel of scholars (Christine Korsgaard, M. Bratman, and Meier Dan-Cohen). Frankfurt's thesis is that love, being volitional, can serve as both a unifying principle in the personality and as moral guidance. I found myself drawn to his approach because of his definition of and application of love as a formative, guiding principle in life. Even though I concede portions of the criticisms leveled by the first two scholars who responded to the lectures and found myself in near total agreement with the final response, I found Frankfurt's approach to be stimulating enough to be worth discussion.

The entire argument is predicated on his definition of love (“Now love is constituted by desires, intentions, commitments, and the like. It is essentially—at least as I construe it—a volitional matter.” (p. 3)) and the assumption, “We [as humans] are unique (probably) in being able simultaneously to be engaged in what is going on in our conscious minds, to detach ourselves from it, and to observe it—as it were—from a distance.” (p. 4) Indeed, he goes further by stating, “Love is not a conclusion. It is not an outcome of reasoning, or a consequence of reasons. It creates reasons.” (p. 25)

So, where Aristotle believed that becoming a responsible person meant “producing” personal character, Frankfurt believes it means to “take responsibility for it [one’s character].” (p. 7) As a result, “…willing acceptance of attitudes, thoughts, and feelings transforms their status. They are no longer merely items that happen to appear in a certain psychic history. We have taken responsibility for them as authentic expressions of ourselves.” (p. 8)

With that in mind, I was quite pleased that he asserted that the mere fact that humans have desires doesn't mean that the world is strictly deterministic: “Some philosophers maintain that, just in virtue of having a desire, a person necessarily has a reason for trying to satisfy it….However, the mere fact that a person has a desire does not give him a reason. What it gives him is a problem.” (pp. 10-11) That is well-said, as is the following: “However, there is no reason why a sequence of causes outside our control and indifferent to our interests and wishes, might not lead to the harmonious volitional structure in which the free will of a person consists.” (p. 16)

I wholeheartedly agree with the following three assertions.
1) “The volitional unity in which freedom of the will consists is purely structural. The fact that a person’s desire is freely willed implies nothing as to what is desired or whether the person actually cares in the least about it.” (p. 18)
2) “Willing freely means the self is at that time harmoniously integrated. There is, within it, a synchronic coherence. Caring about something implies a diachronic coherence, which integrates the self across time.” (p. 19)
3) “By caring we maintain various thematic continuations in our volition.” (p. 19)

Going further, he definitely diverges from classical ethical stances by telling his hearers (and readers) that VALUE doesn’t set morality: “There are many objects, activities, and states of affairs that we acknowledge to be valuable but in which we quite reasonably take no interest because they do not fit into our lives.” (p. 27) In fact, general morality, as in getting along with others, won’t do because “…there is no convincing argument that it must override everything else.” (p. 28)

I agree with his thesis, "Our interest in living does not commonly depend upon our having projects that we desire to pursue. It’s the other way around; we are interested in having worthwhile projects because we do intend to go on living." (p. 36) He contends that those who are so miserable that they sincerely want to die don’t hatelife; they love life, but they hate misery more! They would certainly prefer, if possible, to end the misery instead of the life. (p. 37) Desire for self-preservation is universal and irreducible “…a lavishly fecund source of reason for choice and for action. However, it is not itself grounded in reasons. It is grounded in love.” (p. 37)

And so, he returns to his constituent definitions of love. For philosophical purposes, Frankfurt does not define love as “…romantic love, infatuation, dependency, obsession, lust, or similar varieties of psychic turbulence.” (p. 40) The sense in which Frankfurt means love is: “…a particular mode of caring. It is an involuntary, non-utilitarian, rigidly focused, and—as is any mode of caring—self-affirming concern for the existence and the good of what is loved.” (p. 40) “It is not essential to love that it be accompanied by any particular feelings or thoughts. The heart of the matter is not affective or cognitive, but strictly volitional.” (p. 42)

Christine Korsgaard responded by taking the view that practical reason is the will and rejects Frankfurt’s view that normative authority is volitional, not rational (p. 57). Being Kantian, she believes the combination of hypothetical imperative to reach the ends one wants and categorical imperative in universalizing is the demonstration of the efficacy of practical reason (p. 58). She believes their primary disagreement is tied to Frankfurt’s understanding of rational as being purely logical (p. 59).

In typical Kantian fashion, Korsgaard disputes Frankfurt’s idea that his volitional idea of love as normative guidance has a subjective element by insisting that any morality must have a public component—hence, the categorical imperative and its universalizing (p. 65). One needs to be able to share one’s reasons and that means practical reason.

Michael E. Bratman insists that we still need value and moral judgment . Here, he disputes with Frankfurt that one can separate the will from rationalism because even if we see it as a necessity for us to LIVE (being in love with LIFE), we may not see the universal necessity of others living. So, we may not CARE (p. 80). In addition, Bratman thinks that Frankfurt has played fast and loose with the idea of “fundamental necessities” which he has not clearly defined (p. 80).

Bratman does like Frankfurt’s idea of love as a “reason” for what we do, but notes that some people may truly love what is evil or bad to such an extent that they think it is a reason when it is, in fact, NO reason (pp. 81-82). I worried about Frankfurt’s contention when I first read this assertion and was glad that Bratman pointed this out in his response.

Dan-Cohen doesn’t disagree with Frankfurt so much as to attempt to expand the concept of “wholehearted caring” and “love” to consider the social interaction of individuals as agents of action (p. 91). To demonstrate the need for more than Frankfurt’s basic position, Dan-Cohen cites two separate legal cases. The first was Regina v. Charlson where the latter was a man with a brain tumor who inexplicably killed his son and said, “I didn’t do it.” (p. 94) The second was State v. Snowden where a man had an argument with a woman outside a bar. She allegedly kicked him and he lost it enough to stab her 90 times in killing her.

The issue was that Frankfurt asserted that the issue was whether an individual would take responsibility for her/his action. The jury found Charlson to be innocent by virtue of the brain tumor, but Dan-Cohen suggested that Frankfurt’s idea about being able to take responsibility could have absolved Snowden of responsibility—even though Snowden was properly found guilty in court (p. 95). As a result, Dan-Cohen stated that Frankfurt’s ideas must be supplemental to social concern. There is a serious problem in that blaming others is pointless unless the other cares what we care about (pp. 100-1).

Dan-Cohen’s solution is to expand Frankfurt’s concept so that “us” is used collectively instead of merely distributively as Frankfurt did (p. 102).

Although the responses demonstrate that there is still work to be done in developing Frankfurt's ideas, the basic ideas are quite attractive. In fact, Frankfurt would probably be surprised to discover that Christianity has had this emphasis on love as the basis for ethics since the teachings of Jesus. Unfortunately, ecclesiastical hierarchy and and the romanticizing of the idea of love pushed people away from the basic principle which, in many ways, resonates with Frankfurt's.

After quite a few volumes of Frankfurt's brain droppings I started to see him as a joke. So this comes at a good time. He takes himself seriously, and, predictably, fails.

This is a strange pair of essays. Frankfurt begins on an existential note, noting our self-consciousness is a problem, a hole in our being, as he says, a threat to our well-being. It is also the reason why we take ourselves seriously, why we care to get things right. We reflect on ourselves. When we consider our desires, thoughts and feelings as objects, we begin to desire to have the correct ones. As he says, “To be wantonly unreflective is the way of nonhuman animals and small children.”

Frankfurt says it is taking responsibility for our character is more the issue than the creation of our character, disagreeing with Aristotle. Rather what matters is our current effort to define and manage ourselves. Yet, I think that the past cannot be of no concern.

One thing I appreciated about this book was the straightforward explanation of the importance of caring. And love. Coming from Ivy League faculty it's refreshing. I've since read most of his works and return to this one most often.

Taking Ourselves Seriously is a very good essay.

This guy is self-help to non-philosophy major humanities academics who wish they'd studied philosophy. Regardless, I am enjoying the arguments, and respondent's counter arguments, in back regarding the centrality of specific notions of care / love / reason in the construction of what might be deemed necessary acts of volition.