What philosophical writing about love would you have us read?

There is a kind of love--and for some it may be the only kind that qualifies as true love--that is historical precisely because it does not (oh so wonderfully) rigidly designate its object. The details of such love change with every change in the lover and the friend. Such a love might be called dynamically permeable. It is permeable in that the lover is changed by loving and changed by truthful perception of the friend. Permeability rejects being obtuse to change as an easy way of assuring constancy. It is dynamic in that every change generates new changes, both in the lover and in interactions with the friend. Having been transformed by loving, the lover perceives the friend in a new way and loves in a new way. Dynamism rejects the regionalization of love as an easy way of assuring constancy: the changes produced by such love tend to ramify through a person’s character, without being limited to the areas that first directly were the focus of the lover’s attention.

The above is a passage from “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love Is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds” by Amé lie Oksenberg Rorty, which appeared in Midwest Studies in Philosophy in 1986. It explores the ways in which love and change are related, and how an appreciation of that makes a loving relationship difficult to understand absent an awareness of the particular history of the changes it has wrought on those in it. The essay looks at an imaginary couple, Louis and Ella, and at its end, Rorty writes:

We’ve left them just where they were: in the continuous, delicate, and delicious balancing acts of their lives. But that is just exactly where we should leave them. It is only the details of their particular situation that can determine what would be rational, what would be appropriate, what would constitute (whose?) thriving. No general philosophical conclusion about the presumptive connections between rationality, appropriateness, and thriving can possibly help them determine just what corrections rationality recommends or requires as appropriate to their condition. It can’t even help them determine whether their sensitivities are sound or pathologcal, insufficient or excessive, let alone whether they should ramifi or regionalize their responses to one another, to balance integrity with continuity in such a way as to conduce to thriving. The confluence of rationality, appropriateness, and thriving cannot help them to determine the directions in which rationality or appropriateness or even thriving--taken singly or coordinately--lie. And that is as it should be. Our task cannot be to resolve but only to understand the quandaries of Louis and Ella. Since their condition and its problems are historical, that is, particular, their solutions must be particular.

Happy Valentine’s Day, philosofriends. If you’re up for it, in the comments, suggest a philosophical work on love you’d recommend we check out.

Love Songs: “Water Sign”

By: Addie E. Citchens

Mosaic in Maltezana. Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CCO 3.0.

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined.

Parliament’s “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign” is an unabashed ode to passion, to the base and the sensual, to the possibilities of love in the juiciest ways it can exist between people. The song moans into being, a beseeching follows, then there’s a bass so low you can’t possibly get under it, and finally the central question is posed: “Can we get down?” In true Parliament fashion, the tune doesn’t follow a traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure; it consists of an ever-evolving chorus that departs from the lines “I want to be / on the seaside of love with you / let’s go swimming / the water’s fine.” The arrangement is magnificent and the execution velvety, and the soulful, overlapping ad-libs of George Clinton, Walter “Junie” Morrison, and Ron Ford are just romantic lagniappe. Add the production of the track itself, with its big band-y rise of horns and whimsical flourishes atop the funky bassline, and the song is a liquid love affair that pulls you under and takes you there. It’s orgasmic.“Water Sign” is the B side to the much more well-known “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” from Parliament’s 1978 hit album Motor Booty Affair. While “Aqua Boogie” is told from the point of view of a person who is afraid of water, having never learned to swim, “Water Sign” shows us how beautiful and liberating it can be to get swept away.

Addie E. Citchens is the author of “A Good Samaritan,” out in the Review’s Winter Issue.

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Beloved Philosophical Writings on Love

Love Songs: “Water Sign”