Philosophy 304, Summer 2005, Third Essay Assignment
Directions: Choose one of the following, and write a 1000 word (roughly) essay, using the following three-part structure: in the first part, don’t say what you think, but do exposition of the argument in the quote, including discussion and clarification of the issue and where it fits into the course, telling what the speaker’s position is, what the speaker offers as support, and what you can tell about the speaker’s point of view; in the second part, tell what you think about the issue, offering your own arguments with thoughtful and self-aware support; in the third part, consider the best objections to your own views–tell what they are and figure out what you think about them, including how they might have an effect on your own views. Each part should make up roughly a third of the total essay.
These essays are due at the beginning of class on Monday, the 27th of June. You may turn in your essays early or by e-mail or both. In all e-mail, please put “304" and your name and the question number on both the subject line and in the body of the message, and paste your message into the body of the text. Do not send attached files. Essays turned in via paper copies should be single-spaced with a wide right margin for comments.
1. There is a pattern in many of our love affairs take that goes as follows. When you first begin the affair, there is a remarkable and strong feeling of being better yourself--livelier, more sexual, smarter, funnier, more healthy--and a feeling your new beloved is better, more alive, more fun, more funny, charming, sexy, sane, interesting (and interested in you)--more of all these things than anyone you have ever met. You are on this basis strongly attracted to your new beloved, and there is an unfortunate consequence, namely that you wish to spend time with the beloved, maybe even, God help you, move in with the beloved. After you do begin spending more time together, you begin learning more about who your beloved really is, and in the process, the feelings both about yourself and about your new beloved gradually lose their strength. Finally the relationship becomes dominated not by those feelings but by a clear and cold, hard conception of the truth about yourself and about your beloved as love tapers off and dies. If we had been tough-minded about it at the beginning we would have understood that we felt our beloved, and we felt that we, were better than we really are. These cases then are support for Freud's claim that love is a lie.
2. Consider the purpose of love from a biological perspective. There is an argument based on a kind of sociobiological evolutionary line of thought that goes as follows: Consider in a value-neutral way what a scientific account of sex would be like. That is, boil off all the excitement and feelings and pleasures and attractions and then describe sex. Viewed this way, sex begins to look somewhat bizarre. You have these creatures with a slight amount of sexual dimorphism (the two sexes are shaped slightly differently), with among other things one sex featuring a small appendage and the other an orifice, and the two get together sometimes and behave in a compulsive and strange way, the one with an appendage inserting it into the orifice of the other, sometimes setting into motion a chain of causes and effects leading to a baby. The obvious question is, why would anyone do such a thing? It's silly, undignified, leaves both vulnerable to attack and mishap while they are doing it, takes up precious energy, and is just generally implausible as a reasonable activity for creatures who have other more important things to do. But the answer to the question is clear--we've got to, or the species will die off. So we need something to make us do this. We build in the things we know are there--a whole lotta nerves in the genital area, set up to give pleasure with the right kinds of friction, lust, estrus cycles, and so on.
But so far we've got nothing like love. Now the next thing is to imagine two populations of primates or near-humans, generally alike except that one has love as a shaper of relationships and the other does not. Add in Carl Sagan's millions and millions of this and that, and see whether you can come up with a plausible account of how the population which does have love would be a larger, and thereby evolutionarily more successful, group at the end of the time period in question. And of course we can. The population with love has one small factor in addition to the nerve endings and friction, lust and arousal, and one effect of love (though of course there will be a huge amount of waste, with such things as same-sex couples, loving women past menopause, loving women who are already pregnant, impotent men loving, and so on) will be to get a couple together and sometimes because of the process they will have sex and thereby increase the odds of the survival of the species. So, there you have it. Love is just sex in a Sunday dress, a trick played on us by evolution to get us to make babies just a little more often.
3. The argument for the claim that love is subjective is a simple abstract argument based on a general model of human beings, and it goes as follows: my love is not the same as your love because human beings are separated from each other by the boundaries between our bodies and also even more because we are separated by the impenetrable boundaries between minds, so you can never get to my experiences, perceptions, understandings, emotions, ideas. When we say that my love is not the same as yours, it is always based on just this model of bodies and minds, whether we explicitly state the model as support or just assume it or let us guide us in our thinking.
But when we do any real work based on looking at examples rather than letting ourselves be guided to conclusions by the abstract model, the claim is undermined or not supported. Do we understand what is being talked about when others tell us about love? Yes. Do we have the same ideals for what we want out of the intimate relationships we yearn for? Yes. Do we find ourselves vulnerable to the same sufferings when love goes sour? Yes. Can what we supposed was ineffable be put into words? Yes. Therefore, that abstract model should be regarded with deep suspicion.
4. “. . . Ineffability is easy to explain and easy to find. It arises because we have a rich inner subjective life of ideas and feelings but any person who is separate from the person who has the ideas/feelings cannot see them (the ideas or feelings) unless the person finds some proxy in words to stand for them. But the words stand for the ideas only in the mind of the speaker. Each of us listening has only one person's (his or her own) mental experiences to go on in understanding any speaker. I cannot have your experiences, I cannot have your ideas, I cannot have your feelings, I cannot have your memories, I cannot even see the ones that you have, much less have them myself. The words you say to me stand for your mental life, but when I hear them I can use only my own mental life to make sense of them. Since these two, your mental life and my mental life, are so different, the ability of words to stand as signs for something which is the same for both of us is very doubtful. It is quite plausible that for experiences which are highly variable or unique to the speaker, there is no way to put them into words so they can effectively be communicated by anyone to others. Examples where this is true would include how an orgasm feels to me or to you, how it feels to be dumped by a lover, what makes me love my beloved. Since those things are so unique to each person, so different for each person, so subjective, how could they be put into words for all?”
5. (From an e-mail) Professor Powell:
I have an issue (well, several issues) about the Mapplethorpe book. In particular, the photographs of the small children got me thinking. The issue for me is whether their use is justifiable, or whether it is an awful and immoral thing to include them. We came up with some artistic sorts of reasons for including those other pictures: Mapplethorpe was perhaps trying to represent a whole life, from childhood to old age, and perhaps making a point about how all of life is sexual. This defense of the choice to have pictures of little children, some of them unclothed and exposed, still doesn't take care of the fact that those pictures are bothersome. I don't have a problem with the pictures themselves, in their place--in family photo albums for example--pictures of naked children are really rather cute. The problem with the Mapplethorpe photos is that so many of the other pictures are so strongly sexual--to revulsion sometimes--that pictures of the children become sexually charged too. I want to protect the children from what is in the rest of the book and from being looked at by us as sexual objects and so as less human. There cannot be any justification strong enough for including pictures of children--who surely could not give consent to what they are being made part of--in this book.
[name left off by request]
6. (from an exam answer) “We left the question of which sexual practices are natural or unnatural behind. That may have been a mistake. For some of the items on our list, such as necrophilia and female genital mutilation, surely exactly the right thing to say is that they are unnatural. FGM requires human tools, it does not occur in the animal world, it is despicable, it denies the women to whom it is done most of the natural pleasure they would otherwise receive from having sex, it is done for the patriarchal and sexist purpose of keeping women faithful to their husbands while men have no similar sanctions, it causes a great deal of pain and exposes the girls to terrific risks of infection including HIV, it is done to girls before they understand what they are giving up and is done to them without any attempt to get them to consent to the practice. Surely if anything is unnatural, female genital mutilation is.”
7. The excerpt from Du Pont’s book lays out the basis for thinking that love is subjective and as an implication thinking that many things about love will be ineffable, as though the excerpt is support for those ideas, as though it is an argument. But it is not much of an argument. It is instead only articulating a common assumption in Western (and in some other traditions) abstract or philosophical thinking. How shall we argue for the claim that that assumption is true? This turns out to be quite difficult. . . . [the main arguments for it are circular, using the assumption to explain how e.g. perception works in such a way that it supports the claim.] There are other problems with the assumption as well. The assumption gives rise to many of the standard problems in philosophy (how can we know the contents of another person’s mind? can perceptions yield certain knowledge of the outside world? how can language succeed in conveying live ideas by way of dead sounds or marks? what is the relationship between body and mind?) but if those problems are pseudoproblems or if their legitimacy is questioned, then the assumption becomes questionable too. If the assumption is true, then not only love but everything else as well is subjective, but then the word seems to lose its ability to mark a contrast with things which are not subjective, and with that loss is a loss of ability for the term to make sense. Further, if the assumption is true, then it becomes impossible to distinguish between thinking you are in love and being in love–that is, it is impossible to be wrong about whether you are in love. But it’s not impossible, so the claim that love is subjective is mistaken and the assumption is mistaken. Finally, to extend that last objection, if the assumption is true, there is a problem in answering the question, how do we know that we are e.g. in love? since thinking we are in love is the same as being in love. But when we check on how we do know we are in love, it turns out we know by being able to give arguments and reasons to ourselves which can also be given to others, but others then can argue with us and sometimes help us change our minds.