Abstract
Irving Singer has defended the thesis that the "fine gold thread" of love, its sine qua non, is the bestowal of value by the lover on the beloved, even in those cases where the love itself is grounded in a positive appraisal of the beloved's attributes. He suggests that bestowal is a matter of elevating the importance of the beloved and his or her needs and interests above their appraised merit. I argue that love's bestowal is principally effected through speech acts of the kind that John Searle refers to as Status Function Declarations, the very same linguistic mechanism by which, according to him, all of social or institutional reality is created. On this picture, the roles of lover and beloved are shown to be status functions constituted by a deontology that delineates the partiality of the former towards the latter.
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Notes
This represents an important shift in his thinking about the role of appraisal in love. In an earlier work, Singer (1984), he had suggested that the lover’s positive appraisal of the beloved based on an assessment of the latter’s attributes is at best a causal, and hence contingent, factor in love.
Soble (1990) correctly observes that the hybrid account that Singer settles on falls squarely within the erosic tradition and not the agapic. Nevertheless, the role played by bestowal in his proposal sets it apart from other representatives of the “erosic” school.
The expression "fine gold thread" is taken from Soble (2008).
In Sect. 4 we will suggest another possible example of purely appraisive love that, like the two mentioned in the text, is an outlier.
It is not clear whether Singer would have approved of the way in which I develop his ideas. In particular, he characterizes his own approach to the philosophy of love as pluralistic, in contrast with those he labels reductivistic. It could be that he would have found my analysis to be too reductive for his tastes. Be that as it may, what follows in the text should be evaluated on its own merits as an account of the operation of bestowal in love independently of its fidelity to Singer’s views.
Towards the end of How to do Things with Words, Austin abjures his distinction between performatives and constatives, between doing and saying, since he comes to the realization that asserting that snow is white by saying “snow is white” is no less a kind of linguistic action than is adjourning a meeting by saying “the meeting is adjourned” (Austin, 1975 [1962]). This leads to his (admittedly provisional) five-fold classification of illocutionary acts, with the various types of performative utterances being dispersed amongst these five categories. Although performatives as a class disappear in the new taxonomy, the reliance of these utterances on “conventional procedures” and their susceptibility to all manner of “infelicities” remain under the new dispensation. See also “Performative Utterances” (Austin, 1979 [1962]).
In “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts” Searle introduces the Declaration as follows: “It is the defining characteristic of this class that the successful performance of one of its members brings about the correspondence between the propositional content and reality, successful performance guarantees that the propositional content corresponds to the world” (Searle, 1979 [1975], p. 17).
In the opening chapter of Making the Social World (Searle, 2010) he puts the point as follows: “The claim that I will be expounding and defending in this book is that all of human institutional reality is created and maintained in existence by (representations that have the same logical form as) SF Declarations, including the cases that are not speech acts in the explicit form of Declarations” (p. 13; emphasis in original). See also The Construction of Social Reality (Searle, 1995), and Mind, Language and Society (Searle, 1998), the latter of which is an accessible overview of his ideas intended for a general audience.
Although he concedes that in most cases “there will be no sharp dividing line between the creation of a status function by gradual verbal acquiescence in its existence and the continued existence of the same status function” (Searle, 2010, p. 104).
These can sometimes be backed up with physical power, e.g., the police or the military (though as Searle points out, they too are status functions).
This is where each member of the collective individually acknowledges the status function and believes that the others do as well.
Of course, one can choose to be a scofflaw and simply refuse to pay the fine. But in that case, one is deliberately flouting the prevailing deontology, thereby putting oneself at risk for further sanctions. Contrast this with the situation in which $50 of one’s money is unencumbered. There one is authorized, hence positively empowered, to spend it however one wishes (within legal limits).
See Smith (2003) for a helpful overview of Searle’s recent work on social reality and its provenance in his earlier writings on speech acts and intentionality.
This was suggested by a referee for this journal.
Some further issues are these: In showing partiality towards the beloved, how does the lover balance the autonomous choices of the latter with his or her own considered views of how to promote and protect the interests of the beloved? And how does the lover balance his or her obligations borne of his or her bestowal of value with the impartial obligations he or she owes everyone else? Obviously, these are the kinds of questions that would need to be addressed in a full-dress treatment of love’s bestowal.
With respect to the creation and maintenance of the status functions of lover and beloved, the most obvious examples of speech acts having the logical form of a SF Declaration are explicit professions of love and affection. Thus Singer (1987) says of performatory uses of I love you that “we bind ourselves by what we say” (p. 417). He adds, moreover, that certain non-literal uses of superlative terms of appraisal and endearment also have a performatory function. Put in terms of our analysis, these forms of affectionate exaggeration can be said to help to create and maintain (by serving as markers) the existence of these status functions.
Soble (1990) makes the plausible suggestion that x’s ordering of y’s attributes into a preference ranking to be used in the appraisal of y as a potential beloved constitutes a form of bestowal on y’s properties (see p. 28). This has the interesting implication that in hybrid forms of love bestowal enters at two places: First, x bestows value on y, what Soble calls “the top level”, and second, x bestows value on y’s attributes, Soble’s “deep level” (see p. 28). Put in these terms, my analysis in the text is aimed at explicating how bestowal functions at “the top level.”.
Given my focus on the nature of bestowal and how it operates in hybrid forms of love, I won't say anything further about the affective dimension of love in this paper.
We can safely ignore here polyamory since it doesn’t affect the principal points being made in the text about the nature of the status functions of lover and beloved.
The reason for the slight qualification is to allow for the logical possibility of a case of unrequited love in which the object of someone’s affection accepts the role of beloved and with it the deontic powers it entails despite not being willing or able to reciprocate. There are many ways, both verbal and non-verbal, for someone to signal his or her recognition of, and willing acquiescence in, such a state of affairs. In so doing a beloved contributes to the maintenance of his or her status function as well as that of the lover’s. Needless to say, these cases will be comparatively rare, as most people would not welcome the heightened attention and ministrations from someone whom they did not love in return.
Searle characterizes the nature of commitment involved here as combining “the notion of an undertaking that is hard to revise” and that “of an obligation” (Searle, 2010, pp. 81–2).
This objection was raised by a referee for this journal.
Some non-language using adults might still count as potential lovers on my account, especially those whose linguistic deficiencies are principally performance related. In order to qualify, they would have to be capable of representing the complex deontology of status functions, and of performing gestures that others could recognize as being tantamount to SF Declarations creating and maintaining the status functions of lover and beloved. As any seasoned charades player knows, communicative intentions can sometimes be expressed non-verbally.
A not unhelpful analogy to use here would be the ways in which systems of animal communication are fundamentally different from human languages even while having points of overlap.
I wish to thank Alan Soble and the anonymous referees of this journal for their helpful suggestions and criticisms on an earlier draft of this paper.
References
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