A Philosopher Weighs In On Love, Identity and Romance
Andrea Westlund
In Plato's Symposium, the Greek playwright Aristophanes explained how humans, once both male and female, were split in two by the gods and then left to search the world for their "other halves."
The popular description of marriage and personal unions as a transformation of two into one is romantic, says Andrea Westlund, but not very insightful.
In her paper, "Love and the Sharing of Ends," Westlund reaches for an improved vocabulary to define the process of operating as an intimate long-term pair " one that relies less on a shared identity and more on a relation between individuals.
Westlund, an assistant professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies, has nothing against the idealized view of love and friendship. She just wants to remedy the "incorrectly romanticized parts."
"What philosophers do is not to explain away love," she says. "I do take the experience at face value. But I'd also like to think clearly about what's involved."
Westlund, who came to UWM in 2003 from the University of Pittsburgh, studies ethics and moral decision-making, with a particular focus on joint deliberation and the formation of shared interests. In this work, she examines the role of personal autonomy " or the idea of ‘individual self'" in the context of committed relationships.
"I don't think enough attention has been paid to the symmetrical structure of companion love," she says. The view she advocates is one in which each partner contributes their own necessarily different priorities to their "joint practical perspective."
"I'm arguing that the aim of "sharing ends" is for each person to contribute to a joint practical perspective," she says. "Joint projects and plans must engage each party's own perspective in some significant way in order to count as truly shared."
So how is this different from ordinary compromise? Communication between lovers, she says, lies somewhere between a complete merger of identities and mere strategic bargaining between two separate individuals.
"I'm navigating between two extreme views," she says. "In one extreme, the couple already shares each other's perspectives"they're not thinking as self-interested individuals at all. And that's the view I think is over-romanticized.
"The other extreme says that we are each strategic bargaining units who are working something out and trying to get our own way as the end goal."
In contrast to both of these views, Westlund argues that deliberating "as a pair" in a love relationship involves the empathy missing from the other models.
"The ideal of pairhood constrains the way we deal with one another because we are bonded by mutual regard. We aren't strictly trying to get what each of us individually wants. It's caring that the other's perspective is being treated on par with one's own that makes us behave differently."
This structure also explains the special nature of the trust that is characteristic of intimate relationships.
But Westlund also believes her description of deliberation between couples may have value in the arena of public deliberations which also rely on the diverse opinions of individuals to inform a single outcome.
"Philosopher Marilyn Friedman suggests that we think of those involved in personal joint interest the same way we would view previously sovereign states that form a federation," she says.
As applied to personal relationships, Westlund's view seems to put forth a feminist approach.
"I am interested in the gendered aspects of the committed union," she says. "I keep feminist concerns in play in everything that I write, and that is true of this paper as well. But it also engages more general issues."
Consider, for example, that Westlund's view of union isn't confined to love relationships. It also is applicable to friendships and any relationship where mutual regard exists.
After all, as she points out in her paper, "...sharing ends and reasons is, for lovers as much as for anyone else, a thoroughly interpersonal achievement...."
Read the whole paper: http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/21st/workingpapers/westlund.pdf (from the online working papers from the UWM Center for 21st Century Studies)
Center for Women's Studies: http://www.uwm.edu/Dept/CWS/home.html
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