Nozick’s “Love’s Bond”

 

1. Love in general

• Extension of your own well-being.  Not merely causal.

2. Romantic love

• Infatuation
• Overcoming barriers to losing autonomy.
• Transformation into a “we”:
• Negotiation, trepidation, commitment.
• Extension of your own well-being.
• Pooling of autonomy.  Decisions not made alone.
• Desire for mutual possession, but at the same time, a need that the other be independent and non-subservient.  One care’s about the other’s well-being.
• Want to possess the other as one possesses one’s own identity.  (But don’t we have existential control over our own identity, a control we should not have over that of another?)
• Couplehood, public recognition (ideally).
• “having a new identity, an additional one” (p. 71).
• What is an identity?
• Loss of identity feels like end of life.
• Alertness to that which touches on one’s identity, and hence to dangers to the other, to goods befalling the other, etc.
• Division of labor—one might no longer do things one did before, because one’s beloved might do them instead. 
• Not seeking to tradeup?
• Is it a new entity?  Homeostasis.   But a “we” does not survive replacement of parts, like a self.  (Not clear: I might not survive head replacement or maybe even brain hemisphere replacement.)  Interaction as a unit. 
• Affirmation through love: Each delights in the other, and it is delightful to be delighted in, if it’s “not a whitewashed version of ourselves” that is delighted in.
• You are loved for yourself provided you are loved for what is a part of your identity rather than peripheral.
• Falling in love, though, might come from peripheral characteristics, but eventually they will become peripheral to the love just as they are to the other person.
• Everyone capable of returning love deserves love.
• Should not trade up:
• Investments of time and energy.  This doesn’t explain why it’s worth bothering to go in for something so expensive in terms of time and energy.
• Specialization.  Shaping ourselves to fit with the other.  Of course this is only reasonable if there is a commitment there, since otherwise it is risky.
• But above all, to trade up would be to destroy an identity that is one’s own.  It is like suicide.
• Not only don't want to trade up: cannot while in a we, since if one wants to trade-up, then one is not identifying with the we, and hence already no longer in it.
• The feeling that there is only one other person for one becomes true!
• We would like our beloved to be better but we do not want a different beloved.  We want improvement within the constraints of her personality.
• Sexuality cements the “we”.

3. Differences from other kinds of love

• Friendship has a common purpose, but not a common identity.  It is a bunch of people with their own identities working together.
• Friendship involves sharing for the sake of sharing.
• Cannot have more than one joint identity.  (Why not?  Nozick already admitted we can have more than one identity.)
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4. Why bother?

• Not simply because of benefits to self.  That is not to think in the way that lovers do.  “There is a difference between wanting to hug someone and using them as an opportunity for yourself to become a hugger” (80).
• Fun, excitement, some reasons.
• But really, one does not judge a shift in identity through how it benefits the pre-shifted person.  (Cf. religious conversion.)