Troy Jollimore takes sexualized intimate love as an exemplary form of love and tries (successfully for the most part) to vindicate its standing against certain familiar forms of skepticism about love’s blindness. Following Iris Murdoch, he argues that love involves vision, ways of (figuratively and literally) seeing another as special, unique and valuable. By appealing to vision in this way, rather than bestowal or projection, Jollimore is siding with the views that love is an appropriate, in some sense proportional response, and that there can be ‘reasons’ for love.

‘This combination of a defense of reasons for love, and a Murdoch-inflected visual metaphor, is familiar from David Velleman’s influential 1999 article on the subject. Indeed Velleman is a persistent background influence upon the text (an interesting change from a good deal of recent work which rates Niko Kolodny’s counter-position somewhat more highly.) However, unlike Velleman, Jollimore sees no need to defend the visual dimension of love by excluding desire. He allows that the latter is a constitutive feature of love while Velleman allows it only to be a regular accompaniment. This more inclusive approach makes love’s vulnerability easier to understand. After all, when we love, our hopes may not be met and our desires may not be fulfilled. I will also suggest something that I have tried to show in a bit more detail elsewhere, i.e. that such an inclusion of desire is also more in tune with Murdoch’s position.

‘Jollimore is also less suspicious than Velleman about the view that it is the properties or qualities or the beloved (rather than their sheer personhood) which give us reasons for love. And while Jollimore doesn’t embrace the label of ‘quality theory,’ what he presents does seem close to a sophisticated version of the latter. This poses a number of problems which are flagged up at the outset, problems such as ‘trading-up.’ If you love x because of some set of properties, shouldn’t you then switch allegiance when you encounter someone who embodies those properties to a greater degree? The fact that we don’t make this shift is generally taken to tell us something important about love.

Jollimore’s explanation of our rejection of trading-up involves an appeal to the idea of ‘silencing’ which can be found in John McDowell’s account of virtuous agency. On McDowell’s account, the perfectly virtuous agent is not someone who can overcome or resist temptation, but rather they are someone for whom recognition of the right course of action effectively silences rival options. Once situations are seen in the right way, the appropriate action ceases to be one option among many. It becomes the only real choice. Similarly, love for a particular other, on Jollimore’s account, silences or closes the heart to reasons for loving others. And so, the lover is not to be thought of as a surveyor who makes a neutral comparison of the properties of a variety of rivals and then comes to a view about who they ought to love. Rather, to love someone is to see them as lacking rivals.

‘This appeal to silencing is a plausible one. Perhaps it works better in this context than it does in McDowell’s account of virtuous agency, although (as I will suggest below) Jollimore may ask silencing to do too much work. Even so, it does at least allow him to present love as something which is ‘in between.’ It is genuinely about the recognition of value and admirable properties, but not wholly a matter of such recognition; it involves recognition, but also partiality and blindness, it involves being closed-off from at least some of the faults of the beloved and from some of the merits of others. This is a familiar theme: disclosure is simultaneously concealment. However, the concealment, the blindness, like the disclosure is only even partial. There would, after all, be something pathological about comprehensively failing to recognize the value or accomplishments of others, as if doing so were a matter of disloyalty to the person we love.

To make the point in a more closely-grained way, Jollimore distinguishes between ‘valuing’ and ‘judging to be valuable.’ The lover can still see (and judge) that others matter, that they are valuable, without seeing them as rivals to those we love. The lover may recognize their merits in some ways or up to a point, but not in the way that motivates the lover to act and respond when they see the person that they love. Again, some distinction of this sort looks useful although it has general implications for the relation between vision, judgment and motivation which might draw criticism.

In other respects, love is also taken to be something ‘in between,’ there are (as noted already) reasons for love, but not compelling reasons. Similarly, love is a moral emotion, but it can also conflict with morality. What Jollimore is trying to do (what he largely succeeds in doing) is to return to the idea of Diotima/Plato, that love is a deeply ambiguous force in our lives, a source of great access to what is good and valuable yet capable also of leading us astray. This seems right and its restatement is timely. In relation to the reasons/no-reasons debate of recent years, Jollimore provides an important corrective. While it does make good sense to speak about our having reasons for love, this does not necessarily mean that there can be sufficient or compelling reasons for love, reasons that would require love on pain of irrationality. (And there has sometimes been a tendency in discussions to treat love’s reasons in just this way.)

‘My enthusiasm for the text should, by this time be clear. I like the content, I like the way it’s put together. However, a couple of qualifications may also be due. Firstly, as suggested above, the idea of silencing is asked to do a lot. It is used in a way which tends to sideline appeals to a shared history or, alternatively, appeals to valuing in the context of a relationship, as a rival way to respond to problems such as trading-up. After all, the past that we share with others is surely a major reason for us to love or not to love them, and this is a past that nobody else could have. Even someone with almost supernaturally-attractive eyes, sage-like compassion and devastating intellectual acumen could not take the place of the woman I love because they could not have the relation to a shared past that she has. (In a sense, nothing could count as trading-up.)

This isn’t a new point, and there are points at which Jollimore does bring the past and shared history into the discussion (the fact that someone had property p at t1 may still be a reason to love them at t2). However, I want to suggest that Jollimore does not give the past enough weight. Secondly, perhaps I am mistaken but there also seems to be some drift in the text towards the idea that love of the philosophically interesting sort is always person-focused, as opposed to being paradigmatically focused upon persons. And this is going to generate some problematic exclusions: other non-human creatures, landscapes, and so on. Finally, love seems to be regarded exclusively as a response to particulars. Yet at one point, late in the text, Aldo Leopold is quoted to the effect that we can only be fully ethical in relation to those we love. It’s a nice quote and I’ve seen myself use it more than once at conferences. But, in the sense that Leopold had in mind, it jars with the (Murdochian) focus upon particulars. Leopold gave credence to the idea of love for species and groups (indeed at times he writes only about the latter). As fond as I am about Murdoch, a case for such love (as robust, or philosophically significant) could perhaps be made. 

Even so, these are secondary quibbles about a fine book which will deserves a readership well beyond the ranks of those with a special interest in analytic philosophy of love.

© 2012 Tony Milligan

Tony Milligan teaches philosophy at the University of Aberdeen and is the author of Love (Durham: Acumen, 2011), Beyond Animal Rights (London & New York: Continuum, 2010) and Civil Disobedience (London & New York: Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2013).