Perri Sriwannawit recently defended her PhD thesis in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. This blog post is an adapted version of the discussion on romantic love in her PhD thesis.
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| Perri Sriwannawit |
Harry Frankfurt (2004, p. 80) argues that love happens outside of our immediate control; we cannot control who we love or stop loving them on a whim. However, Frankfurt still suggests that love is free in an important sense. In this article, I will propose that love is only somewhat involuntary in the sense that he suggests, and that his notion of freedom is not the only way to explain freedom in love.
In Frankfurt’s (1971) earlier work, he argues that freedom of the will is grounded in the alignment of first-order desire (the desire that motivates us to act) and second-order volition (what we truly endorse as our desire). Frankfurt’s conception of freedom is not to do with whether we have voluntary control, but more to do with whether our volitional structure is aligned as such. What’s more, for Frankfurt (2004, p. 87), love itself is our own “configuration of the will”. In simple terms, our actions are shaped by what we love, and it is love that organises our will and guides our motivation.
Complications inevitably arise when we have conflicting loves. In these cases, Frankfurt (1998, p. 165) suggests that although we cannot fully control love, we can reflect on and prioritise our loves. And once we reach wholeheartedness, we can perhaps stop loving something that we love less in order to protect what we love more (Frankfurt, 2004, p. 46).
In my view, Frankfurt’s suggestion requires significant cognitive effort from the agent. Frankfurt (2004, p. 99) himself states that “wholeheartedness is difficult to come by”. Although he does not describe the process as cognitive work, it seems to be more than just a passive process of being guided by love. Frankfurt’s idea of resolving conflicting loves can be somewhat concretely described as follows: reflecting on and understanding our volitional structure, embracing what we love more, reaching wholeheartedness, and then letting wholeheartedness guide us to act in accordance with what we love more.
Frankfurt’s account of love heavily focuses on love that has already been cultivated and stabilised, and not on the uncertainties, hesitation, or the ebbs and flows that usually occur over the course of loving. In comparison, Natasha McKeever’s view is more accommodating to the complexities and dynamics of love, especially in its early stages. For example, everyday decisions can greatly influence love: decisions on how to spend Friday night, whether to ignore the beloved’s annoying habits, whether to move away, and so on (McKeever, 2019, p. 222).
For McKeever, freedom in romantic love lies within the conscious choices and voluntary commitment we make to enter into the relationships, to maintain them, and in all other choices we make in the relationships. She suggests that the actions created by those choices constitute, to an extent, the love we experience. I agree with McKeever that relationship choices play some decisive role in love. And accordingly, love is also free in this way, rather than only in the way that Frankfurt suggests.
In sum, I propose that whilst love is largely beyond our immediate control, we still have control over love by making non-love-related choices and taking deliberate actions. That said, we should still be mindful that these choices cannot always determine whether love occurs, persists, or subsides in many cases.