#title Romance Without Love, Love Without Romance
#subtitle The Ethics of Breakup
#author Agnes Callard
#date Spring 2021
#source Liberties; Journal of Culture and Politics, Volume 1, Issue 3 (Spring 2021). <[[https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/romance-without-lovelove-without-romance/][www.libertiesjournal.com/articles/romance-without-lovelove-without-romance]]>
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-11-16T11:18:23
#topics love, philosophy,
*** The Ethics of Breakup
I have only ever had one friend as crazy as I am. Once we painted a giant fireplace onto the wall of her apartment as decoration for a dinner party we were hosting — and then, at the end of the party, she led our guests up the stairs onto the roof of the building, bringing with her a boombox playing Strauss. I climbed up the fire escape in a ballgown. I held out my hand. We waltzed with speed and gusto. Our friends and professors looked on, terrified: there was no railing. Another time she planned a scavenger hunt through San Francisco, and I found myself in a store selling sex toys, forced to examine each device meticulously to find the next clue. The finale of the scavenger hunt was at a disco, and she danced with me there, too, even though I had to cover my ears — I am very sensitive to sound — and there is nothing in the world dorkier than someone dancing with her hands over her ears.
I haven’t done as much dancing in the seventeen years since I ended that relationship. The breakup happened like this: we had planned an elaborate outing in Sonoma County for her birthday. The picnic supplies alone took days to gather. We left early, and got home late, and, as she told me when she hugged me goodnight, everything in between had been perfect. It had been a perfect day. The next morning, I wrote her a letter telling her that I did not want to be friends with her anymore.
I had my reasons, of course. As I say, she is crazy. I am, too, but in a very different way. The immense effort it took for me to spend a whole day with her and ensure that it was “perfect” — that I did nothing that would offend, upset, or bother her — proved to me that we just didn’t work. And I thought: when a relationship does not work, each party has the right to exit. It will hurt, but we will get over it, and we will both be better off in the end. The thing is: the pain hasn’t gone away. I still miss her. I still dream about her. And lately I have come to think that part of the problem lies in how I broke things off: unilaterally. I took matters into my own hands, as though there were no rules governing how you break up with someone.
“All’s fair in love and war” dates to 1850, when the ethics of warfare were very different than they are today. Two world wars generated explicit international agreements as to behaviors prohibited in wartime; we now reject wars of conquest and plunder; we harbor deep suspicions about the glorification of military violence. Have we made similarly substantive revisions in the ethics of love?
“All’s fair…” made its debut in the then popular but now obscure British novel Frank Fairlegh: Scenes from the Life of a Private Pupil, by a certain Frank E. Smedley. The scene runs as follows. Frank, on the brink of unilaterally breaking off relations with his love-interest, recoils at opening the seal on a stolen letter — “I cannot avail myself of information obtained in such a manner!” His more pragmatic interlocutor is the one who has the “All’s fair…” approach: since the letter promises to reveal her virtue and innocence, he insists that Frank should open it. It is notable that Frank’s high-mindedness about invasions of privacy at no point extends to questioning his own breakup plan. He apprehends no moral duty to talk the issue through with the girl.
Today, as in 1850, high-minded people feel free to condone unilateral breakup — in romantic as well as non-romantic love. When people act as I did, exiting a friendship perceived as, on balance, detrimental, we tend to view the decision as sad but not immoral. The reason is clear: we see love as having a certain kind of autonomy from the space of moral judgment. Even the arch-moralizer Kant agreed that you cannot be “morally obligated” to have feelings for someone; and it was for that reason that he interpreted the biblical command to “love thy neighbor” in terms of the rules governing your voluntary treatment of your neighbor. You do not actually have to feel love for them. You cannot legislate yourself into experiencing passion, empathy, or lust.
And this is part of what we love about love: that it affords us an opportunity to lose control, to go a little crazy. But does it really follow from this that a free and clean exit is available? I don’t think so: even if it is impossible to moralize one’s way into passion, it remains open to us to moralize about passions that are already in place. There are more regulations governing exiting relationships than entering them.
These regulations exist not in spite of but because of the fact that the connections between people are idiosyncratic and passionate. It is precisely because such connections are real and irreplaceable that disconnection is not a trivial matter. Over time, people’s lives grow together, such that what happens to one person affects another. When I come to care deeply about you, I can actually feel your pain. And that lateral growth also makes vertical growth possible: with your hand in mine, I become someone who waltzes, paints walls, and drinks Japanese tea that looks and tastes like the forest floor. (Having spent a year abroad in Osaka, she introduced me to tea ceremonies of various kinds.)
You can’t waltz by yourself. When I lose you, I also lose the me I became for you. And vice versa. Which is why cutting you off, once we have grown together, is an act of violence. I am not “cutting” anything visible, like your arm or leg, but I am nonetheless cutting away something that is a part of you — me. It is still an amputation. And I am amputating — acting on your life — without your consent. As I see it, cheating on someone is not in any obvious way more wrong than unilaterally cutting off relations from them. These are both ways of taking into your own hands the agreements that bind your life to another person’s life; they are acts of psychological violence.
A decade after that breakup, I faced the prospect of divorce. I consulted with friends and family, many of whom advised me not even to discuss our problems with my husband, but simply to quash my concerns until the children were grown. The consensus was that I was morally obligated to stay married for the sake of my children. But even if I could have kept my discontent secret, which was doubtful, I felt that doing so would have been a deep betrayal of the life that I shared with my husband. And once I did, he agreed that divorce was the only option.
The strange thing — or so it seemed to me — was that once we did divorce, those same friends and family pushed me towards “a clean break.” I should stop having regular meals with my ex; we should separate our bank accounts; we should reduce our connection to the minimum required for co-parenting our children. One person recounted, somewhat proudly, how he hadn’t spoken to his ex since their children graduated from college, decades earlier. Now, a decade after the divorce, the fact that I still share close friendship and many everyday matters of life with my ex is perceived by many as peculiar and in some way wrong, and forgivable only to the extent that it is beneficial for the children.
The parent-child bond is the most striking exception to a blanket “all’s fair” permissivism about love. It would take extraordinary circumstances for someone to feel justified in disowning their child, and this makes sense: children depend profoundly on their parents, and moreover they did not consent to enter into this dependence. My view is that a relationship with a friend or a spouse differs from a relation-ship with one’s child in degree, not in kind. My husband and I had come to depend on one another in many ways over seven years of marriage, and those forms of dependence could not simply be ignored or wished or decided away.
As for consent, it is not an alternative to dependence but a mechanism for generating dependence — mostly by way of tacit and gradual and small-scale agreements, but occasion-ally, as in the case of marriage vows, by way of sudden and large-scale agreements. We don’t simply inflict our lives on others; rather, we learn, over time, to coordinate, to synchronize, to co-deliberate. We grow together, bit by bit, by way of agreement and experience: the end result is something too real to be annulled by one party’s simply deciding to opt out.
When it comes to moralizing, people tend to take an all-or-nothing approach: either a bond is sacrosanct, entailing a demand of total sacrifice, or everyone is free to “just walk away.” When I got divorced, I drank the kool-aid that said I was scarring my children for life. That turned out to be false — they are fine, more than fine, really — but let the record show that I believed it, and went ahead anyway: I was not prepared to completely sacrifice my own happiness for theirs. Nor was it only for their sake that I was reluctant to completely sacrifice the relationship I had with their father. Even if I could have done so, I did not want to just walk away from him. I care about him. I do not want to lose the me I am for him. And I owe him things. No break between us could or should be “clean.”
The extremes of total bondage and total freedom strike me as being, somehow, on the wrong scale for human relation-ships. They are appropriate for creatures much larger than us — or much smaller, perhaps. We humans need to do our living, and our moralizing, in the middle. Often a relation-ship that doesn’t work in one form might work in another form, a renegotiated one. And even if no livable arrangement can be arrived at, such an ending should be the product of the reasoning of all parties involved.
Consider how far we have come from the ethics of The Iliad, in which Diomedes is glorified for choking a river with the blood of his enemies. We now understand that moral excellence lies less in using, and more in knowing how not to use, physical force. Humanity has been slower to acknowledge the reality of psychological injury and trauma, and correspondingly slower to see the rules governing violence in that domain. I propose that one of those rules is that you are not allowed to “just walk away.”
Obviously I am not saying you can never break up, or get divorced. What I am saying is that all is not fair when it comes to these endings; you cannot simply cut people off; you are not free to leave at any time. If your life is entwined with someone, then a new arrangement between the two of you must be the product of an agreement you can both live with. Also, you must be open, forever, to revising that agreement if and when the other person offers reasons for doing so.
Those requirements are robustly ethical. In my break-up letter to my friend, I made the usual excuses, arguing that the relationship was in some way “toxic”; that this was the best course for both of us; that the break “had to” happen. Whether or not those claims are true, enforcing them on her without her consent was wrong. It was like shoving words in her mouth and forcing her to say them. Instead of deliberating together with her about how to move forwards, I took matters into my own hands: I tore out a part of her life, and a part of mine, violently, just because that violence seemed to me to be in my interest. If that kind of behavior is not wrong, what is?
Which is not to say that it is wrong in absolutely every instance. Just as there are extraordinary cases in which physical violence is called for, so, too, with psychological violence. Some relationships really are toxic; sometimes a unilateral break is the only form of self-defense available to a person subjected to the predations of another. But if you think about how often people call their exes “jerks” or “bad people” or “evil” and how infrequently we otherwise accept this as a characterization of adults we personally know, you will see that we have reason to be suspicious of our own breakup behaviors. We vilify the other to vindicate the shortcut of force.
And yet the tendency to cheat our way into justification — to make all seem fair when all is not fair — is really a cause for optimism. It is women, more than men, who see the need to vilify, and that makes us some sort of moral vanguard. If you think of your exes as a string of losers and villains, you are, in effect, conceding that that is what they would have to be in order for you to have been permitted to treat them as you have treated them. (But think about your friends’ exes, and those of your friends’ friends: how many losers and villains can there be?)
It is important to remember that the scope and the stringency of breakup rules are proportional to the depth of connection achieved. If we ignore this, we are apt to caricature the ethics of breakup as mandating contractual arrangements for turning down a second date. If there is nothing there yet — no bond, connection, no fund of shared experience, no grown-togetherness — then moralism is indeed misplaced. There is no symmetry between entry and exit.
*** The Romantic Empiricist
Aristotle is likely to strike you as unromantic, especially if you come to him after Plato. In dialogue after dialogue, Plato confronts us with the bottomlessly destructive but trans-formative power of erotic attachment. Plato is familiar with what a person is capable of doing for the merest glimpse of his beloved, and it terrifies him, and he is riveted by his own terror. By contrast, “tame” is not a tame enough word for Aristotle’s discussion of love in the Nicomachean Ethics. It is a long discussion — two whole books, a fifth of the entire work — and some of the topics discussed are: what beneficiaries feel for their benefactors, how lifelong friends share thoughts and speeches, the affection of business partnerships. No sex. No passion. No motorcycle rides in the rain. It’s true that there are no motorcycles in Plato either, but that is only because they weren’t invented yet. Nicomachean Ethics rewritten for the third millennium would still be decidedly free of walks on the wild side.
So Aristotle is not a romantic about interpersonal attachments — but that is not the only place romanticism can take root. What about other areas? Poetry is a classic one. Aristotle’s aesthetic theory inaugurated a whole tradition of detached, icy-cold, arm’s-length analysis. Maybe he is right that tragedies give rise to cathartic experiences, but I doubt anyone has ever had one of those while reading the Poetics. Religion? Aristotle’s god is Thought Thinking Itself, a god who didn’t make the universe and doesn’t care whether we live or die. Social Justice? Aristotle is no utopian, and he is unmoved by the plight of the worst off. Aristotle does not romanticize nature either, or wax poetic about ecosystems or sunsets. Unlike other scientists, he does not see the totality of the natural world as a “thing” to be appreciated or even theorized. When he does speak of it, he does so in a maximally unromantic way, as providing a set of tools for humans or environments for animals.
In fact Aristotle rarely uses the word “nature” the way we do: instead of speaking of “nature” as the sub-lunar totality inhabited by lions, caterpillars, dolphins, and the like, he uses the word to refer to each of those inhabitants, severally rather than jointly. He calls them “natural things” or describes each one as having its own proprietary “nature.” With this observation, we draw nearer to the fire of the passion that burns in Aristotle. There is one subject that quickens his heart: animals, more specifically body parts. It is not in his Politics, Ethics, Poetics, Physics, or Metaphysics that we find Starry-Eyed Aristotle. If you want a lyrical Aristotle, you have to read his Parts of Animals.
Where else in the corpus do you find him talking about glimpses of beloveds:
Just as the briefest glimpse of someone we love is more enjoyable than a precise and steady vision of other things, even great ones, so too the most glancing contact with celestial bodies yields more pleasure than we can get from all this earthly stuff around us. For the planets are the noblest of all.
Now this passage demotes animals (“all this earthly stuff around us”) by contrast with stars and planets. But if you have read your share of romance novels, you will recognize the trope of the contrastive set-up: “Her face was plain, nothing to remark upon…” Aristotle goes on to say that animals may not be lofty, but they have the inner beauty of what is both near and knowable:
Even when it comes to those organisms bereft of sensible charms, the nature in them is a kind of artisan who delivers incredible pleasures of the mind to those who, because of their philosophical nature, are able to discern the causes of things.
The word “nature” shows up twice in the Greek of this passage, as in my translation. First, the nature of the thing to be known, for instance a species of tiny crab whose back feet are flattened — almost as if by some artisan! — into the shape of oars to aid them swimming. That “nature” finds its twin in the nature of the knower: a philosopher, on the lookout for the causes of things. Aristotle’s famous four causes — formal, final, efficient, material — are the pillars of his scientific worldview, a worldview that stands firmly opposed to Plato’s disdain for (what he took to be) the unknowability of the sensible world.
Plato was disturbed by the fact that nothing in the sublunar world stays the same: every object in the office I’m sitting in — the papers, books, desk, carpet — is slowly falling apart, becoming not-itself, transitioning between being and not being. Even a beautiful boy does not stay beautiful for long. Nothing does — except the Form of the Beautiful! And so, just as in Raphael’s painting, Plato redirected our attention away from this muddy mess, upward, to the Forms that are always what they are. Relatedly, the forms are simple — unlike someone who is both beautiful and human and seventeen years old and brown-haired. The boy can lose his beauty and stay a boy, whereas the form of the beautiful does not dissolve into a puddle of unrelated qualities. It is beautiful, period. And forever.
Aristotle’s big move was to notice a method in what struck Plato as madness. While granting that destruction is one kind of change to which the sublunar realm is subject, Aristotle denied that all changes should be understood on the model of destruction. When animals are generated, alter, grow, and locomote, they change in such a way as to hold themselves together. Their changes exhibit a pattern, an internal logic. The logic is complex: there are patterns that hold across all multiple animals (organs for reproduction, nutrition, locomotion, perception) and then patterns that are specific to a given class of animals (swimming vs. flying) or just one species (see paddle-feet of tiny crabs, above). Each species gives our minds a foothold in the empirical world; they pair the logical nature of our minds with a natural logic of self-transformation.
How do they do this? By being divided into organic parts! “Organic,” organikos, in Greek means “tool-like”: the parts of an animal, like the “oar-feet” of the crab, are the tools that it uses for performing its various functions. The methodology of Aristotle’s Parts of Animals is to read the diachronic logic of how an animal changes over time into a synchronic logic of organ-parts: the parts of an animal are tools for self-changing. Unlike the (random) set of attributes that any physical object might have, the parts of an animal are “bound together”: they are not only undetached, but in fact undetachable. Aristotle explains this special rule for understanding body parts — his famous “homonymy principle” — in yet another poetic passage in the introductory portion of the Parts of Animals. He says that a body part — an eye or a hand — cannot be separated from the whole, living body. A severed hand, he says, is no more a hand than the marble hand of a sculpture. It may look like a hand, but part of what it is to be a hand is to be the sort of thing that is used for grasping and pointing. What goes for the hand goes for the body as a whole: a dead body is a body in name only. (Hence the word “body” or “hand” is a mere homonym when used to describe a dead body or a severed hand.)
Aristotle makes life an essential rather than an accidental property of the matter that it permeates. The dead body, that is, the non-body, is something that decomposes — it merits Platonic change-cynicism; but a living body is something different altogether, undergoing a very different set of changes. Unlike a Form, an animal is not unified by being simple. Yet it isn’t a puddle of properties, either. By virtue of having organic parts that depend both on one another and the presence of life for being what they are, the animal is a unified multiplicity. And this, insists Aristotle, is a thing of beauty that Plato totally missed out on.
Empiricism after Aristotle becomes something “hard-nosed,” something to contrast with idealism. The no-nonsense empiricist sees the world as a check on theories concocted in the armchair; his project is that of bringing the high-flying mind down to earth. Aristotle’s is not the empiricism of the test but of the quest. Unlike later scientists, Aristotle did not understand the natural world as a testing stone for the “laws” that we try to produce to render it intelligible as a whole. Rather, he saw it as a hunting ground populated by living nuggets of intelligibility. These unified multiplicities are the mind’s quarry, which can be sniffed out by the one who discerns causes. Aristotle, you might say, is an Obama-style romantic: animals are the changes we can believe in.
Aristotle anticipates the distaste — he calls it the “childish aversion” — that most people feel for lower animals (bugs, worms, etc.), and tries to win them over to his point of view with an anecdote. He tells the story about the time the philosopher Heraclitus was warming himself in his kitchen. Guests arrived unexpectedly and they were hesitant to join him there. It seemed uncouth to step into such a lowly space as a kitchen. Heraclitus bade them enter by saying: “There are gods here, too.” Aristotle presents this as a lesson for how to think about the sublunar world: “in every class of animals there is something to behold in wonder.” The animals and animal-parts that disgusted you are, in fact, things of wonder. They are not wonderful because God made them. (He didn’t.) Animals have internal principles of change and rest, which is to say: they make themselves, continuously, over and over again. They author their own being. They are not divinely generated. They are, simply, divine.
Like his contemporaries, Aristotle was impressed enough by the regular motions of the planets to classify them as divine. He saw the planets as wonderful, and lofty, and noble. But they are too far away to really love, especially given the possibility of loving the one you’re with: Parts of Animals adopts the “girl next door” approach, pointing, over and over again, to these whirlwinds of intelligibility, held together through constant change by a pattern all their own: logical blood; systematic skull-sutures; distinctive dung. Slugs, mice, sea-urchins, goats. These things, and their parts, might look ordinary, or boring, or gross, but they are tiny self-creating demiurges, islands of logic, gloriously gory. Is there a heart so hard as to remain unmoved?
*** Romance
On Wikipedia I never skip past the “personal life” section. So I know that Tove Jansson met her lover using a secret attic passageway, and that they summered together on an island off the coast of Finland. I know that Ingmar Bergman’s many marriages included all the mothers of his children — except Liv Ullmann, who might have been his true soulmate. I know that Vladimir Mayakovsky dedicated many of his poems to a woman whose husband sanctioned their love. The Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy is low on amorous content, except in the case of the John Stuart Mill-Harriet Taylor Mill saga, which it covers in satisfying detail.
I know these things because I care. And I am not alone. The English word “romance” is literally synonymous with the words “excitement,” “fascination,” and “allure.” The sales of romance novels total more than a billion dollars a year, and many non-“romance” novels nonetheless leverage romance as a key plot device; as do a great plurality of pop songs, poems, movies, and so on. It’s not hard to guess why: as soon as the slightest suggestion of the possibility of romance surfaces in a narrative, I start willing the characters to get together with a passion that belies the fact that not only I do not know these people, they are not even real. And yet if I could push them into one another’s arms, I would.
For all our interest in romance, we don’t seem to theorize about it very much. Friendship, attachment, relationships, commitment, all those put-you-to-sleep topics are well-covered in analytic philosophy, but there is no philosophical account of the agonizing process by which lovers reveal themselves to one another and learn that they belong — or do not belong — together. There is no philosophy of all the topics covered in the pop songs: the longing for a soulmate, the heartbreak of rejection, the insecurity of the getting-to-know you phase, the joy of romantic union, the pain of missing one’s beloved. My sense is that philosophers view the word “romance” with some embarrassment, and the result is that we lack a theory of it.
Nor can we claim to have mastered the practice: for all the books written on how to get someone to marry or sleep with you, I don’t think anyone would even pretend to write a how-to guide on falling in love. There are online lists of tips on how to keep passion in your marriage, to be sure, but following them is about as romantic as online dating. Romance commands our rapt attention and draws our interest magnet-ically, but we do not have, or even seem to seek, the most basic understanding of how it works, or how to bring it about. We are obsessively inept at romance.
A friend once told me of a girl she grew up with in Russia who, as a child, was terrified at the prospect of falling in love: she thought that after falling in love you die. Raised on a steady diet of fairy tales, this insightful girl saw past the “happily ever after” tagline to the fact that in story after story, after the prince and the princess finally overcome all their trials to be united in marriage, the next thing that happens is: nothing. After you fall in love, the story of your life is over.
Growing up means learning all the ways people rebel against “happily ever after.” Affairs, for instance. And yet that is but a new way to fall off the cliff of romance: whether the unfaithful husband opts, in the end, to stay with his wife, or leave her for the new woman, as soon as he resolves this dilemma, the romance is once again completed.
And there is this question: Instead of having an affair, why not pursue romance within your marriage? The answer to it lies in the moralistic tone with which it is usually posed. If something as wholesomely innocuous as marital affection lent itself easily to romance, well, a sign of that would be that those lists of tips would be actually useful for some of us, and unnecessary for most of us. Marital romance is close to a contra-diction in terms, which is why it is often a response to external obstacles: children, challenges, tragedies — even affairs.
One cannot avoid sympathy for the rage of the long-suffering wife whose quest for more connection with her ever distant husband ends in the discovery that he sought this connection in the arms of another. And yet her husband’s unavailability may have been precisely what made him a possible object of romantic striving for her in the first place. Romance is a tricky thing to want. And this cannot be written off as a problem only for “bad marriages.”
Even fans of marriage such as myself — I’ve done it twice — must acknowledge that it has a world-class PR team. Think about what a coup it was for marriage to win over the gays, rather than allowing them to build a competing institution to which many of the straights might eventually defect. And then to spin this as a victory for gays rather than for marriage — “ok, fine, if you absolutely insist, we’ll let you in” — is the mark of master manipulators.
And so when someone claims that lifelong romance is simply a matter of being willing to work at it — as though anyone has ever been unwilling to do this kind of “work”! — I am inclined to dismiss this as moralistic scolding; and I am equally suspicious of the reassurance that time somehow automatically, quietly, imperceptibly deepens the marital connection. I am struck by the contrast between how much pressure one is under to claim to love their spouse more deeply with each passing year, and how little clarity there is about what “deepening” even means in this context. (“Imperceptibly,” indeed.)
The fact that romantic yearnings stubbornly resist incorporation leads some to simply dismiss their validity: “all anyone can really want, at the end of the day, is a partner who provides solid, reliable, warm, affectionate companion-ship.” Sorry, Team Marriage. I cannot agree, all the beauties of conjugal life notwithstanding. The simple truth is that many people evidently want more romance than a marriage, even a good one, can offer them. And no one seems to know why.
When we were falling in love, I introduced my (not yet) husband to this Magnetic Fields song, and he explained its meaning to me:
You are a splendid butterfly
It is your wings that make you beautiful
And I could make you fly away
But I could never make you stay
You said you were in love with me
Both of us know that that’s impossible
And I could make you rue the day
But I could never make you stay
Not for all the tea in China
Not if I could sing like a bird
Not for all North Carolina
Not for all my little words
Not if I could write for you
The sweetest song you ever heard
It doesn’t matter what I’ll do
Not for all my little words
Now that you’ve made me want to die
You tell me that you’re unboyfriendable
And I could make you pay and pay
But I could never make you stay
He said the message of this song is that you cannot make anyone love you and you cannot make yourself love anyone. No words, no theories, no commands, no machinations afford a person romantic control, because there is no such thing as romantic control.
One thing I have noticed about times of heightened romance is that life seems to become story-like: little details, such as discussing the song in the car, stand out, and other details, such as where we were driving to, fade into the background. Events take on symbolic meaning, and some of them become pivotal or climactic. Even those who had the (romantic) misfortune of meeting by means of online dating will find ways to tell that story in such a way that makes its result a surprise. Romance, like humor, must always be surprising. Just as everyone is a comedian to their own baby, everyone is a novelist of their own romances.
If romance lends to real life the shape and feel of a narrative, it is also true that fictional narratives become more lifelike when romance enters the picture. In a book or a movie, the emergence of a romantic storyline corresponds to an awakening of attention and interest in the audience — as though, finally, the events were somehow happening to us. Just about every genre of serialized TV show — from comedic sitcoms to detective shows to soap operas — uses the prospect of romantic union between the characters to keep us interested.
There is a connection between the fact that the romance of others can seem so intimately relevant to us, and the fact that we approach our own romances through a kind of aesthetic haze. If something very important and earth-shatteringly good can be happening to me, even though I am not in charge of it, and do not even understand it, then the significance of events is not a matter of my controlling them. Romance does not address me as a knower, or as a doer, but as a powerless appreciator waiting breathlessly to see what the butterfly does next. And once I have been relegated to the position of spectator with respect to my own life, I can take that same approach to the lives of others. If I can see myself as a character in a story and still care, why should I not be able to care about other characters in stories?
Romance fictionalizes life; romance vivifies fiction.
*** Ethical Self-blindness
When you get what you wanted, that doesn’t necessarily satisfy you. Sometimes we don’t know what will make us happy; sometimes we don’t want the right things. Call this condition “ethical self-blindness.”
I borrow the term “self-blind” from the philosopher Sydney Shoemaker, who introduced it to describe a hypothetical condition of introspective failure. A self-blind person in Shoemaker’s sense is someone who cannot “look within” to discover what she believes or desires, though she can make inferences about her mental states by observing what she is inclined to say or do. Such a person has the same access to her own beliefs and desires as she has to those of other people. Shoemaker raises this possibility only to dismiss it: he thinks that we cannot actually imagine a human being who constitutionally lacks inner sense.
Unlike Schoemaker’s self-blindness, ethical self-blindness is a term meant to refer to a condition that is not only possible, but actual and commonplace. It is all around us. Someone with ethical self-blindness lacks a certain kind of first-personal expertise—not that which pertains to identifying the psycho-logical contents of her own mind, but that which pertains to picking out the items that conduce to her welfare, her happiness, her good.
Ethical self-blindness is, in fact, our original condition: children need parenting because they do not know what is good for them. Children are not self-blind in Shoemaker’s sense, of course—quite the contrary—their sense of what they want is often especially powerful and intense. When I was about eleven years old, what I wanted more than anything was a small rubbery doll, shaped like a worm, that glowed in the dark. It was called a “glow worm.” My mother spent a long time—in my memory it was eons—resisting my pleas. She couldn’t understand why I would want such a stupid toy, especially since I never played with dolls. Eventually, however, she gave in and bought me one; they only cost a few dollars.
As soon as I got it, I took a pair of scissors and cut it into about ten pieces. My mother looked on, horrified. (I was after the magic of the glow-in-the-dark material, and the fact that it took the shape of a cutesy worm was incidental to my purposes. I knew that if I revealed my plan from the outset, I would never get one.) My objective was to put a piece of glow into each of the pockets of my dresses, and then I would never be in total darkness. This did not pan out—the material glowed much less than I thought it would, and it had to be “charged” by being held up to the light before it would glow for even a short time. The reality of owning a dismembered worm doll came did not measure up to my dream of having pockets filled with light.
And why did I dream of this in the first place? I wasn’t even afraid of the dark! Every parent is familiar with the phenomenon of handing a child the gift he has been begging for and seeing it neglected in minutes. The dreams of children are wild, passionate, and misguided. And so we need our parents to make decisions for us—about what to eat, when to sleep, how to spend our time (“I’m bored!”). At a certain point this rankles, and we begin to rebelliously insist on choosing for ourselves.
Unfortunately, however, the leap from the orbit of parental authority does not itself cure one’s ethical self-blind-ness. Peer pressure enters as a stopgap, and replacing the authority of parents with that of friends does not always represent much progress. How does a person learn to want the things that really do make her happy? My suggestion is that she does it by learning to induce self-blindness in the other sense—not the ethical one, but the kind that Shoemaker dismissed as a philosophical fiction.
One thing that filled me with frustration as a child was the fairy-tale trope of wishing oneself into misery. Over and over again, we find the same slip twixt the cup and the lip — you get to marry the princess, but she’s a jerk; you get to live forever, but as a grasshopper; everything you touch turns to gold, including your relatives. I hated these stories, and felt sure that I would not make the same mistakes as the idiotic fairy tale people all those wishes were wasted on. It might appear that wishes inevitably conduce to happiness: the wisher has no aim but to benefit herself, and the wish gives her unlimited resources for doing so. What could go wrong? The answer is: ethical self-blindness. Stories about wishing gone awry are trying to inform children that they do not know what is good for them, and it is almost definitive of childhood to want to shut one’s ears to this particular message.
The alternative to wish is work: exercising agency in guiding your goal to realization, thereby steering it out of the way of countless bad options, transforming it in ways that are responsive to what the world has to offer, and thus ending up with something you are actually happy with. Consider the trope of the evil genie who will give you the hamburger you so fervently desire…but he will sadistically make sure that it is encased in a block of lucite, or made from human flesh, or the size of a grain of sand. Since wishing means delegating the filling out of the details to another, there are always loopholes for the genie to exploit. Wishes have a schematic, underspecified, almost cartoonlike character, and this is what makes the mental images associated with wishes so vividly introspectively accessible. Since I am content to leave out most of the details in my wishes, it is easy for me generate the mental image that represents exactly what I want. For example: pockets filled with light. The wishing mind has perfect Shoemakerian self-insight.
The working mind, by contrast, must itself chart the path between the goal and whatever concrete option out in the world comes closest to satisfying it. Over the course of this journey, its conception of what is wanted is never fixed, but always shifting. The working mind is a mind in motion, learning to accommodate to reality: hunger, some specific food, ending up at the grocery store, cooking, eating; or choosing a paper topic, finding a thesis, outline, writing, revising, rewriting.
When we go to a restaurant, we short-circuit the food acquisition process along wish-like lines: hunger to plate. The same happens when we buy a term paper online: topic to paper. The difference, of course, is that in the first case the cooking was merely instrumental, whereas the thinking that was supposed to take one from topic to paper was the entire point of the exercise. I have found, over many years assigning papers, that even when they are honestly produced, shortcuts of one kind or another abound in them: summary in place of analysis; a profusion of weak arguments instead of developing one strong one; failure to proof-read. My pet peeve is when students treat a literary text as a source to be mined for examples of one’s independently chosen thesis, rather than allowing the thesis to emerge organically from careful reading. The student’s aim is, first and foremost, to get the paper done; she will do almost anything to avoid thinking.
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Why do people find thinking so unpleasant? My proposal is this: thinking (up new things) entails alienating yourself from the thoughts that (already) occupy your mind. Thinking puts a damper on introspection.
A lot of what we call “distraction” is simply having a fixed, immediately available mental content stand as alternative to the vague, fuzzy, provisional, work-in-progress character of whatever the working mind was working on. Distractions are in the wish family, as are cravings, which likewise involve an insistent introspective attention to schematically defined object of desire.
The working mind is bereft of such vivid, perfect access to its own contents. We speak of focusing on goals, but this does not mean holding some fixed, wish-like conception of the goal—rather we mean constantly playing with the interface between goal and world. The malleability of such thinking prevents me from ever being able to say, “this is precisely what I want.”
The struggles we face to achieve self-control and resist immediate gratification are struggles to endure alienation from the contents of our own minds. It is not an accident that the children who prevailed in the marshmallow test were prone to close their eyes, or to turn their backs to the marshmallow, or to say our loud, “there is no marshmallow.” Strength of will involves inducing a kind of self-blindness—not the ethical kind, but the Shoemakerian kind. Shoemaker is right that introspective failure cannot be the natural default for any human mind, but it can become second nature. It is desirable to cultivate some degree of self-blindness in oneself, because thought is the enemy of thinking.
When we find ourselves succumbing to distraction or the cravings of the moment; when we choose wishful fantasizing over meaningful work; when we take shortcuts that leave us disappointed in ourselves, we are inclined to think of this behavior as childish. Adults are continuously engaged in an effort to sideline our idées fixes, so as to be open to re-alignment with reality. I watch my child, immersed in imeginative play, and I see him “open a door” where I know there is none. He sees what he wants to see, I see what is there. His mind is sharply introspectively available to him; I hold mine at a distance from myself, the better to employ it for thinking. Or at least: much of the time, I do this. It is easy to forget that adults, too, are capable of dreams that are wild, passionate, and misguided.
In the domain of love, romance, and eros, we encounter a characteristically adult form of unrealism: hyper-attunement to the contents of our own minds and desires, and a corresponding inclination to privilege fantasy over reality. If we say that love is “blind,” we may use the term in the ethical sense—love drives us into the arms of our own misery and not the Shoemakerian one. Nothing could be more introspectively available to someone than her feelings of heartbreak or lust or jealousy. It is when their contents are most adult that the operations of our minds most perfectly resemble those of children.
Why does romantic rejection hurt and sting as much as it does? Because we have some image of ourselves, some beautiful picture of how happy we could be if only we could have that one thing—which is to say, that one person—that we want. And then that very person snatches away our dream of pockets filled with light, and leaves us with nothing but a dismembered worm doll.