Commitment and the bond of love

Australasian Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 74, Issue 3, 1996, Pages 454-466

  Van Hooft, Stan ^a  

^a DEAKIN UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149529156     PISSN: 00048402     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00048409612347431     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Soble, A., The Structure of Love (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). Soble makes this a demand of authenticity in love. He rejects any conception of love which 'prevents self-knowledge [or] serves as an excuse for not reflecting on the grounds of our preferences', (pp. 62-63)
2. For a general critique of the idea of the lucidity of consciousness, see Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 'Adaptivity and Self-Knowledge', in her Mind in Action: Essays in the Philosophy of Mind (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988) pp. 172-191.
3. David Wood suggests that lucidity might be impossibly difficult to achieve in his 'Honesty' in Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy and Personal Relations: An Anglo-French Study (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1973) pp. 191-223.
4. See also Paul Gilbert in his Human Relationships: A Philosophical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) p. 28,
5. Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) p. 212
6. Robert C. Solomon, Love: Emotion Myth and Metaphor (New York: Anchor Press Doubleday, 1981) p. 27.
7. See also Robert Nozick, 'Love's Bond' in Robert C. Solomon and Kathleen M. Higgins (eds.), The Philosophy of Erotic Love (Lawrence, Kansas: The University Press of Kansas, 1991) pp. 417-432.
8. The formation of a 'fused self' is also central to the account of love given by Mark Fisher in his Personal Love (London: Duckworth, 1990).
9. Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Collins, 1985) ch. 10.
10. I explore the notion of integrity and the associated concepts of commitment and caring in my 'Integrity and the Inchoate Self, Philosophy Today 38 (1995) pp. 245-262. In discussion, Graeme Marshall has suggested that the concept of loyalty might also be relevant.
11. For a fuller discussion of commitment see chapter one of my Caring: An Essay in the Philosophy of Ethics (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1995).
12. See also, Jeffrey Blustein, Care and Commitment: Taking the Personal Point of View (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).
13. Harry Frankfurt has given much thought to the question of whether we can discover the basis of our caring about things and whether we can reflectively endorse our desires (and, in my sense, commitments). He claims that what is required is that the agent identify with one or other of his volitions. Doing this is not an act of will, but a being satisfied with one's condition and so the threatened regress is avoided. 'Satisfaction is a state of the entire psychic system ? a state constituted just by the absence of any tendency or inclination to alter its condition.' (Harry Frankfurt, 'The Faintest Passion', Presidential Address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 66, No. 3, November 1992, p. 13.) And again,
14. This is a phrase usefully developed by Roger Scruton in Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986) p. 241 ff.
15. For a further discussion of promises to love (as exemplified by marriage vows) see Susan Mendus, 'Marital Faithfulness', Philosophy 59 (1984) pp. 243-252
16. and John Wilson, 'Can One Promise to Love Another?', Philosophy 64 (1989) pp. 557-563.