Rational love: Not mad at all
Love - romantic, passionate, erotic love - is often portrayed, understood, or lived as a type of madness. Scientists reveal chemical imbalances, psychologists classify it with various disorders, but while reading an old interview with Martha Nussbaum called “The Ethics of Literature” (sorry, no reference, it just exists as a dog-eared photocopied text found in a folder marked ‘personal’) I am reminded of the rational basis of this most misunderstood emotion.
Nussbaum, referring back to Aristotle, says:
…emotions such as love, grief and anger are based upon reasoning about what’s valuable, and in fact are suffused with reasoning.
And then, something from William Hazlitt:
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
Falling in love then is surely a philosophical act, an act of reason. In falling in love we are acting to improve our life. Life with the object of our love is valued more than life without our love object. When we fall in love, we are concerned with the ‘good’ and how to live a good life. In this sense, falling in love is also an ethical act.
Posted by By: kathryn | 
2007/06/01 | Meta - Philosophy - Personal - Ethics - Quotables | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]
You know, this line of argument - that sexual attraction/love is really just a means to getting one’s “genetic material propagated as widely” as possible - always surprises me. But, I know, it still must persist. I was talking to an acquaintance the other day. She, 38, single, no kids, but wanting kids. Me, 37, no kids, not wanting kids. We talked about various things, the possiblility of future regret and the basis of that regret, if we were to feel it. For her, in the end, having kids is about leaving something behind. Leaving a part of her behind. “If I don’t have kids, no one will remember me, and then what would have been the point of me living? No! I want to be remembered.” That was how the conversation ended. She wants to fall in love and have kids. Yes, I guess her attraction to men is a means to having kids and propagating a part of herself, so that, in some way, she may live on. Survival instinct. Maybe, yes. 