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flwydThis post draws on a presentation by CU philosophy professor Luc Bovens presented after a showing of The Crying Game a few years ago.
Personal identity is a concept deeply ingrained in human ways of thought. Unfortunately, it presents several philosophical problems with no easy and intuitive solutions. Most philosophy can get by by assuming an intuitive solution exists, but on their own, the problems are both easy to understand and hard to solve.
Consider love.
Do you love a person (whatever that means), or do you love a set of habits, quirks, physical features, mannerisms, thought patterns, memories, and so forth, hereafter referred to as "Feature Set."
If you love a person, do you love them because of their Feature Set, or do you fall in love with some soul-like entity for reasons (or a lack thereof) which have nothing or little to do with the Feature Set?
Loving the Feature Set seems kind of shallow, and not something most people would admit. If somebody loves me because I'm smart, witty, handsome, and rich, will they lose interest in me when they meet someone smarter, wittier, more handsome, and richer? That certainly isn't the love the romantics have in mind.
But loving without regard to the Feature Set also seems a bit odd. If you loved someone and they changed every aspect of themselves, would you still love them? Would it even make sense to call it the same person?
it seems reasonable that love usually happens somewhere in the middle ground. You love many things about a person and you also love the person such that if your love wanted to change some feature, you would support that transition. For instance, suppose Alice is attracted to Bob in part because of his casual demeanor. They fall deeply in love and remain so for several years. After being fired from his job, Bob decides he wants to be more businesslike and reform his casual demeanor. It seems silly for Alice to leave him over that; if she truly loves him, we would say, she would help him achieve this goal.
But by the same token, we can understand the person who falls out of love with someone when they learn something new about their partner. If Carl falls in love with Denise, but later finds out that she cheats on him or murders babies or what have you, we can understand him losing that lovin' feeling. We can also understand Alice falling out of love with Bob if he transitions from a casual attentive guy to a workaholic who doesn't give enough time to his relationship.
So perhaps a good common case is this: people become attracted to other people because of the Feature Set. But there's a deeper connection than the Feature Set (perhaps it's some core set of features or perhaps it's something less tangible). With a strong enough bond, the Feature Set can change and the couple remains in love. But sometimes the Feature Set changes in ways that cause love to fade. Some times, of course, the Feature Set changes in ways which make the people incompatible, but they remain in love. This gets especially messy. Furthermore, the falling out might not be linked to a change in the Feature Set, but a discovered discrepancy between the Feature Set and the imagined Feature Set.
To put it succinctly, love can fade or break because the person you loved is now a new person or because the person you loved is not the person you thought.
The latter is the essence of the Crying Game. The transgendered in specific, but anyone in general, can be affraid that a person will fall in love with an idea and then lose interest when they find out that an idealized feature isn't present. This could take the form of an unexpected penis, a revelation of undesirable behavior, the discovery of annoying habits, or a change in fundamental goals, ideas, and personality.
We are often presented with the idea that Love (and especially Marriage) Is Forever, but it seems more naturally transient, though with the possibility of a very long tenure.
The Cosby Show gets the last (paraphrased) word:
Personal identity is a concept deeply ingrained in human ways of thought. Unfortunately, it presents several philosophical problems with no easy and intuitive solutions. Most philosophy can get by by assuming an intuitive solution exists, but on their own, the problems are both easy to understand and hard to solve.
Consider love.
Do you love a person (whatever that means), or do you love a set of habits, quirks, physical features, mannerisms, thought patterns, memories, and so forth, hereafter referred to as "Feature Set."
If you love a person, do you love them because of their Feature Set, or do you fall in love with some soul-like entity for reasons (or a lack thereof) which have nothing or little to do with the Feature Set?
Loving the Feature Set seems kind of shallow, and not something most people would admit. If somebody loves me because I'm smart, witty, handsome, and rich, will they lose interest in me when they meet someone smarter, wittier, more handsome, and richer? That certainly isn't the love the romantics have in mind.
But loving without regard to the Feature Set also seems a bit odd. If you loved someone and they changed every aspect of themselves, would you still love them? Would it even make sense to call it the same person?
it seems reasonable that love usually happens somewhere in the middle ground. You love many things about a person and you also love the person such that if your love wanted to change some feature, you would support that transition. For instance, suppose Alice is attracted to Bob in part because of his casual demeanor. They fall deeply in love and remain so for several years. After being fired from his job, Bob decides he wants to be more businesslike and reform his casual demeanor. It seems silly for Alice to leave him over that; if she truly loves him, we would say, she would help him achieve this goal.
But by the same token, we can understand the person who falls out of love with someone when they learn something new about their partner. If Carl falls in love with Denise, but later finds out that she cheats on him or murders babies or what have you, we can understand him losing that lovin' feeling. We can also understand Alice falling out of love with Bob if he transitions from a casual attentive guy to a workaholic who doesn't give enough time to his relationship.
So perhaps a good common case is this: people become attracted to other people because of the Feature Set. But there's a deeper connection than the Feature Set (perhaps it's some core set of features or perhaps it's something less tangible). With a strong enough bond, the Feature Set can change and the couple remains in love. But sometimes the Feature Set changes in ways that cause love to fade. Some times, of course, the Feature Set changes in ways which make the people incompatible, but they remain in love. This gets especially messy. Furthermore, the falling out might not be linked to a change in the Feature Set, but a discovered discrepancy between the Feature Set and the imagined Feature Set.
To put it succinctly, love can fade or break because the person you loved is now a new person or because the person you loved is not the person you thought.
The latter is the essence of the Crying Game. The transgendered in specific, but anyone in general, can be affraid that a person will fall in love with an idea and then lose interest when they find out that an idealized feature isn't present. This could take the form of an unexpected penis, a revelation of undesirable behavior, the discovery of annoying habits, or a change in fundamental goals, ideas, and personality.
We are often presented with the idea that Love (and especially Marriage) Is Forever, but it seems more naturally transient, though with the possibility of a very long tenure.
The Cosby Show gets the last (paraphrased) word:
MRS HUXLTABLE: If I died and you later met someone who looked and acted just like me, would you marry her?
MR HUXTABLE stammers a bit and answers a derivative of "I suppose so."
MRS HUXTABLE: Would you at least keep my picture?
MR HUXTABLE: No, I wouldn't keep your picture. She looks just like you, so I wouldn't need your picture!"
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Pt 1: what decides who loves whom?
Date: 2004-05-02 06:17 pm (UTC)1) An individual's feeling of love (for narrative ease, let's say "my" love) is dependent on external factors. That is, my love for you is controlled by your Feature Set, or even your "soul".
2) Loving/being in love with = living together.
As for assumption #1, how disempowering! How irresponsible! I push the buttons in my brain. If I really love you unconditionally, that means finding out that you eat babies, or sleep with other people is not going to make a difference. If you have a stroke and stop being brilliant, or contract a flesh-eating virus in the jungles of Borneo and become grossly disfigured, or have chronic erectile dysfunction, I'm still the one in charge of how I feel. Not circumstances. Whether or not I feel that you love me back, I get to choose how I feel about you.
(That, incidentally, is why love does not protect you from accident, disease, or death. Because real love is not threatened by those things.)
Now, does that mean it's best for both of us to live together? Maybe. Maybe not.
Y'ever hear someone in an abusive relationship whine, "But I LOVE him!" Okay. I'll buy that. So what?
Let's accept that all of us, even abusive or cheating or drug-addicted or seriously mentally ill people, are guided by a divine higher self; that we are all doing the best we can at this moment, with the resources we have; that in the Great Pattern, we are all on the perfect path from who we are to who we are becoming. So, in the grand perspective, we are all worthy of being accepted and cherished just as we are. Yea. Somebody explain to me how it follows that any given person is required to subject themselves to the behavior of a specific somebody else?
Once empowered with the understanding that my feelings are entirely in my control and not dependent on your Feature Set, I then get to make choices about commitments; about working through problems together or moving apart.
Very empowered. Not terribly "romantic"? What about that nifty, soaring "in love" kinda feeling? Sure, I still believe in that. But the fact is, it's a quantifiable biochemical process. We know what it is and how to create it.
(see part II, an accounna I tend to be verbose)
Re: Pt 1: what decides who loves whom?
Date: 2004-05-02 07:08 pm (UTC)As for your other running theme of "my feelings are entirely in my control," history and art beg to differ. Even though it would often be extremely beneficial, most people have trouble deciding to start or stop being in love with someone. It doesn't seem to be the sort of thing we have conscious control over. I'll certainly argue that emotions are under a person's control, but those controls usually take the form of biochemical processes, deep and ancient psychological instincts, and learned non-conscious reactions. But if people had much control over their emotion of love, there would be a lot less whiny country music.
The problem of personal identity is this: Unconditional love is the idea that person X will love person Y no matter how person Y changes or what person Y does. But if everything changes about person Y -- from personality to gender to appearance to memories to position in the world -- is it really the same person?