Philosophy 290-4

You don’t love someone because of their qualities. If you did, then your love would be fickle and inconstant, since qualities change, and different people may share the same qualities. Might it be that love comes first, that it is the love itself, or the loving attitude, that first puts you in a position to value the other, to perceive their qualities, to appreciate who and what and how they are?

But this would be a paradoxical outcome, since it hostages love and perception each to the other. To perceive the beloved, you must in a way already love them, but you can’t love them without already perceiving them.

One solution would be to allow that the connection between love and perception, or love and knowing, is tighter than we usually think. Something like this thought is suggested by Hanne de Jaegher (2019) who writes that “in their most minimal, stripped down form, loving and knowing are manifestations of the same basic, existential way of relating.”

The purpose of this seminar is to explore the nature of love with an eye to the thought that perceiving and knowing might be, at least in some respects, love-like, and that love, for its part, might be, at least in part, the exercise of perceptual consciousness or knowledge. One of the ideas that will guide us: that an account of love is critical to our understanding of what it is enter into any kind of relationship with anything at all.

Among the authors we may read are: Anne Carson, Daniela Dover, Harry Frankfurt, Edward Harcourt, John Haugeland, Sara Heinämaa, Belle Hooks, Hanne de Jaeger, Troy Jollimore, Niko Kolodny, Iris Murdoch, Gabriel Richardson Lear, Jonathan Lear, Simon May, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Plato, and Gillian Rose.