Love and Other Emotions Across Time

Abstract

In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis notes the typical arc of most long-term romantic relationships: “[F]or all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer. It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure” (Lewis, 1994, p. 50). This dissertation consists of three essays, each of which thematizes a general phase of romantic love over time: courtship, partnership, and bereavement. Upon close inspection, each phase is fraught with normative problems. What follows is a brief sketch of the problems and my proposed resolutions. The first essay of my dissertation examines an aspect of romantic courtship. In “Ethical Seduction,” I take up the worry that seduction belongs in the category of sexual wrongdoing alongside coercion and rape. I claim that those with this worry tend to play down our ambivalence towards seduction. Despite our discomfort, we sometimes desire to be seduced. Many romantic clichés reflect this desire: we want other people to sweep us off our feet, carry us away, make us fall in love with them, woo us. This tension makes clear that seduction has some appeal and implies that it is not a straightforward moral problem. I argue that seduction is not wholly bad and suggest that ethical seduction is possible. Though “ethical seduction” may sound like an oxymoron, I propose criteria to mark the good-making features of seduction, which include the indirect, non-rational engagement of people’s latent desires and interests in ways that (i) amplify any positive emotions with which people are not in tune, and/or (ii) deactivate the problematic inhibitions that lead people to resist what they freely desire. The second essay, “Love and Evaluative Conflict,” concerns long-term romantic partnership. I take it as a fact that lovers often disagree. We may reject the specific goals our loved ones pursue or the broad values they hold. Some philosophers suggest that such evaluative conflict makes romantic love in its ideal form deficient. But I argue that this is mistaken. On the contrary, our ideal of love holds that we can love people for ‘who they are’ (as we say), even as we profoundly disagree with them. My argument draws on intuitive cases from screwball comedy about love amid conflict, love across political party lines, as well as ‘forbidden’ love across religions and cultures. At a deeper level, I sketch an ideal of love I call intimate independence and argue that this ideal is (i) fully compatible with any evaluative conflict, (ii) embedded in our ordinary attitudes towards mature love between equals, and (iii) an ideal worth achieving. As long as intimate independence is a compelling ideal, deep conflict will not seem like an obstacle to true love. The ideal reminds us that love can bring together people with radically different points of view, and that to insist on shared ends or values is thus to miss a part of the meaning and power of love. Finally, if a couple doesn’t split over their disagreements, their partnership ends in death. This dissertation is no different. In the last chapter of this dissertation, “Grief Rekindles,” I examine something often repeated in editorials, blogs, and popular books about the deaths of loved ones: grief is forever. I present a qualified defense of this folk insight. We don’t feel the impact of loss maximally all the time. Rather, we continue to feel it for the rest of our lives, because grief doesn’t simply diminish but rekindles like fire. As I put it, grief is an intermittent emotion, capable of going out of existence, then existing again as the same thing. I argue that this trajectory is fitting. Intermittent emotions have a rational status; their distinct temporal pattern gets something right about their objects. This proposal dissolves a recent philosophical worry that grief diminishes over a short time despite the persistence of its eliciting loss. Moreover, it provides a sophisticated sketch of the fittingness of emotions over time: intermittence is a norm to evaluate emotional fittingness alongside character and intensity.