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The Burdens of Love

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Abstract

While we primarily love individual persons, we also love our work, our homes, our activities and causes. To love is to be engaged in an active concern for the objective well-being—the thriving—of whom and what we love. True love mandates discovering in what that well-being consists and to be engaged in the details of promoting it. Since our loves are diverse, we are often conflicted about the priorities among the obligations they bring. Loving requires constant contextual improvisatory adjustment of priorities among our commitments. Besides delighting in—and being enhanced by—the presence and existence of another person (a place, an institution, profession), love requires extended reflection and work.

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Notes

  1. In isolating love as a subject for philosophical analysis, we abstract it from its phenomenological complexities and its psychological contexts. (See Sects. 3 and 4). See (of all people) Hume, Treatise Of the Human Understanding 2.2.9 SB 384-5. “Tis not the present sensation …which determines the character of any passion, but the general bent and tendency of it from beginning to end.”

  2. See the essays by Geertz et al. (1984), Rosaldo (1986).

  3. See, for example, Strachey (1959), Freud (1947), Bowlby (1969/1999).

  4. See, e.g., Kraut (1986), Rorty (1986a), Badhwar (2003). Kolodny (2003), Velleman (1999), Setiya (2014), Jollimore (2011).

  5. See Kant (1963); Emerson (1841).

  6. See Stocker (1976, 1979).

  7. I am grateful to MindaRae Amiran and Richard Schmitt for stressing this point.

  8. Although personal love by no means exhausts the range of our loves, I shall, for the sake of simplicity, initially use the example of romantic love to examine the structure and dynamics of generic love. In Sect. 4, I will turn to other, familiar but less often analyzed expressions of love—the love of home, of a profession or of an activity.

  9. Plato himself has Socrates describe the Divided Line without introducing the political analysis that forms the bulk of the rest of the work. (Republic VI, 509D-513E.) I’ll return to the connection between love and political activism in Sect. 4.

  10. See Rorty (1986b).

  11. The distinction between the causes and constituents of love presupposes a full dress analysis of the content, structure and dynamics of intentional attitudes that I cannot undertake here. See e.g. Anscombe (1957), Thalberg (1993), Aquila (1975).

  12. I am grateful to Bill Ruddick for this example and to Berislav Marusic for objecting that love of causes and country, activities and professions do not carry the same kind of care and concern of personal love. It is true, Arthur does not move to Venice or undertake to become a professional art conservationist. But his love does not just consist in a passing elation during a visit to Venice. For it to be an authentic love rather than generalized elation, it must be expressed, (as it might be) by his contributing to the Save Venice Fund and organizing a campaign to prevent the Scuola di san Rocco from selling “The Raising of Lazarus” to Donald Trump for his private collection. Less dramatically and more subtly, Arthur’s love of Tintoretto would be expressed by changes in his perceptual range, by his increased sensitivity to the dramas of light and shadows, by his doing some research on Tintoretto’s palette and studio.

  13. Because I do not understand them, I have omitted two significant directions of love: the love of God (and God’s love of Mankind) described by Augustine (1950, 2002) and the love of Humanity described by Kant (1996). Augustine thinks the ability to recognize and fulfill the obligation to love God is itself a gift of grace; Kant believes that fulfilling the duties of the love of Humanity falls to the rational will.

  14. I am grateful to Avner Baz for pointing out that “a commitment to [one’s] job is a part of a commitment to [oneself], while a commitment to one's partner is a commitment to her/him.” It’s true that Abe’s commitment to Ella is focused on her, rather than on himself as a media consultant, still his commitment to Ella is an essential part of his self-understanding, to himself-as-loving-Ella.

  15. I am grateful to Richard Schmitt for stressing this point. See Rorty, “The Historicity of Love…” loc. cit. and Benjamin Bagley (2015).

  16. See Held (2006), Haslanger (2012) and Rorty (1998).

  17. I am grateful to Richard Schmitt and to Robert Frederick for raising this concern.

  18. I am grateful to MindaRae Amiran, Avner Baz, Robert Frederick, Berislav Marusic, Richard Schmitt and Ben Sherman for comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Amelie Rorty

  2. Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Amelie Rorty

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  1. Amelie Rorty
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Correspondence to Amelie Rorty.

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Rorty, A. The Burdens of Love. J Ethics 20, 341–354 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10892-016-9216-y

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