The Southern Journal of Philosophy (1985) Vol. XXIII, No. 3

LOVE, PARTICULARITY, AND SELFHOOD Mark Bernstein University of Texas at San Antonio

I have a wife, Nancy, whom I love very much. Let us suppose that I were informed that tomorrow, my wife Nancy would no longer be part of my life, that she would leave and forever be unseen and unheard of by me. But, in her stead, a Nancy* would appear, a qualitatively indistinguishable individual from Nancy. Nancy and Nancy* would look precisely alike, act precisely alike, think precisely alike, indeed would be alike in all physical and mental details.

There must be, of course, some differences between Nancy and Nancy*, for after all, there are two persons in question and not merely one. Thus whatever is essential to their numerical differences is an item that they can’t share. These differences should not be overestimated. The very matter that comprises Nancy may comprise Nancy*, albeit not simultaneously. And at least in some conceptions of the mental the memories of Nancy* might be the very same (i.e. token-identical) as Nancy. And they may, again depending upon one’s tastes concerning universals, be the very same height. Perhaps they could not have had the very same origin, i.e. the very same mother and father.’ Intuition again may differ here, but at least this seems clear: if Nancy* could not have father Mike and mother Pat, she certainly could have had father Mike* and mother Pat*, i.e. her parents might be indistinguishable from Nancy’s, as she herself is from her own counterpart.

I believe that reflection upon our attitudes regarding such a thought- experiment will prove quite illuminating. I hope to show that some light is shone on the respective natures of causality, personal identity, and rationality. And as a result, we should have a better idea of how we view ourselves and why it is that we view ourselves in this way.

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The fact of the matter is, of course, that I would care enormously about this exchange. I would feel as if I were to suffer a tremendous loss. I’d believe that 1 was losing somebody very dear to me, somebody I love, and substitutingsomeone in her place whom I didn’t love, indeed didn’t, at least by personal contact, know the least bit about. True, when Nancy* arrived I couldn’t perceive any differences (there wouldn’t be

Mark Bernstein is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He haspublished in Mind, The Southern Journal of Philosophy and has a forthcoming article in Metaphilosophy.

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any to perceive). She would look, talk and act toward me precisely as Nancy did. And, since we can hypothesize that Nancy* who loved Mark* knew nothing of this exchange program, it appears as if she would love me-just as much and in identical fashion to Nancy’s loving me. So why do I care, why I am so upset at the prospect?

On one level, my consternation is not perplexing. 1 love and only love Nancy, Nancy* # Nancy, so I don’t love Nancy*. And, of course, it’s a quite mundane fact about human psychology that losing a loved one is, ceteris paribus, enormously upsetting.

But my unwillingness and unhappiness concerning this exchange program points to something far more poignant. For it seems to demonstrate, first, that one can genuinely and sincerely believe that he will love someone if and only if that person has certain qualities A, B, C , . . ., meet a person with those qualities and yet have no love at all for that person. Secondly, but not independently, it seems to suggest that no informative list of necessary and sufficient conditions for ‘x loving y’ can be given. This suggestion gains plausibility when we consider what love-making characteristics Nancy has which Nancy* lacks which makes it that case that I only love the former. It’s true, of course, that it was the set of properties of Nancy and not those of her counterpart, that caused me to love her, but this causal relationship between Nancy and myself does not explain why it is that I’m so upset about the exchange program, i.e. why it is that I’m so upset at being with a qualitatively indistinguishable person. Given this very powerful intuition, it appears as if there is something about loving another person which makes it immune from cognitive reduction.

These remarks it should be noted are not blindly transportable to analyses of other concepts. To take the most popular case in recent years, consider the debate concerning an analysis of ‘x knows that p’. In the main, attempts to show that such analyses fail have been piecemeal. There has been some putative analysis followed, a few months later, by an intuitively plausible counterexample demonstrating the insufficiency of the analysis. That is, there has not been any general argument to show that analyses of Knowledge are doomed because of the very nature of Knowledge.

When asked why I love Nancy, what is it about Nancy that makes it the case that I love her, I would reply that I love her because (and only because) she is kind, sensitive, intelligent, and beautiful. Although, as the foregoing thought-experiment suggests, it needn’t be true that I would love another with precisely the same qualities in the same degrees. This seems to be in conflict with the traditional Humean view of causation. For if A is the cause of B, in the standard sense of A being the sufficient condition for the occurrence of B, then ceterisparibus, if A obtains, B obtains.

The traditionalist may object that it isn’t kindness, sensitivity, intelligence, or beauty,perse which is that which makes me love Nancy,

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but rather an indexing of these properties in Nancy herself. Thus my reply to the interrogator really means that the conjunction of the kindness-in-Nancy, sensitivity-in-Nancy, etc. is the cause of my loving her.

But this answer poses a major problem for the Humean, for these new states are now, in principle, non-repeatable, i.e. it’s conceptually impossible for another person to exemplify intelligence-in-Nancy, et al. And worse yet it seems to make all cases of causation sui generis, and with this as a result, the idea of Humean causation is eradicated. Universal succession of events is an impossibility to behold, for where before we saw many instantiations of one billiard ball moving, touching another billiard ball and the second one moving, we now view many unique events. We see ball A moving, touching ball B, and ball B moving. We then see ball C moving, touching ball D, and ball D moving, and so on. Or we see ball A moving, touching ball Band ball B moving at t 1, followed by the sight of ball A moving, touching ball B, and ball B moving at t2. In either type of case this attempt to save the traditionalist account precludes the possibility of causal laws construed as regularities. To Hume, of course, this exclusion would forever doom persons from having the idea of causation, but even if we delete this psychologism from other regularity theories, they are left with the unenviable burden of making sense of causal laws without the recourse of speaking of generalizations.

This uneasy attitude toward the exchange does not, of course, commit one to the factually false belief that one cannot lose love, or that one cannot be in love with another. There is nothing strange about the notion that, in due time, I may well fall in love with Nancy*. After all Nancy* is very much like Nancy, and after my deep sense of loss has disappeared, Nancy* seems as likely a candidate as the next person (if there is one) with whom I will fall in love. And if this were to happen, it will be because I have come to love the kindness, sensitivity, and intelligence in Nancy*, and would, as before bemoan my fate if something dastardly were to happen to her.

We are still, then, left with trying to give a rationale for my attitudes toward the loss of Nancy and toward her replacement by Nancy*. But are we already assuming too much?

Some might immediately object that feelings, emotions, and attitudes are neither rationally warranted nor rationally unwarranted, that it makes no sense to give this type of evaluation to our affective life. This mode of reasoning, can in spirit, be traced to Plato with his tripartite view of the soul where the affective and rationale parts, though at times complementary, were distinct. Plato, notwithstanding, we d o make evaluations of this sort all of the time. A man’s jealousy of his wife may not be warranted (i.e. there really is no evidence available to him to support the hypothesis that she is cheating), a woman’s envy of her neighbor may bejustified (i.e. there is available evidence to support the

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supposition that her neighbor has a happier marriage), and a brother’s hatred for his sister may be warranted (i.e. there is easily obtainable evidence that his sister has intentionally crippled him). So we should not yet be satisfied with an appeal to the arationality of attitudes.

Using the above examples as models, we might start an answer by asking whether there is obtainable evidence that supports my depression and sense of loss given that Nancy will be replaced by Nancy*. Well, what would such evidence be like? The most obvious answer is that what we find desirable and worthwhile in Nancy would be lacking in Nancy’. But this cannot be the basis of such a distinction here, for even if we countenance the idea of indexed properties, they would appear indistinguishable. In effect, any appeal to indexing merely pushes the question back one step, i.e. the question now becomes whether our depression about the exchange of sensitivity-in-Nancy * for sensitivity-in-Nancy is rational?

I want to suggest that our attitudes toward this exchange are intelligible. But our search is misplaced if we continue to look for a demonstration of such justification in perceptible or external factors as we did before. And this should not be suprising since there are no perceptible differences.

To see this consider a complication on our thought-experiment. Imagine that I, B, the lover of Nancy, were told that later this evening I would be destroyed but that a B* the lover of Nancy* would replace me. That is, B’, would have thesame relation to Bas Nancy* had to Nancy. No one’s life (except mine of course) would be affected in the least. Even Nancy’s life, if she isn’t notified of the switch would not change. And this might be the sense of some solace and comfort for me. Still I take it that my primary attitude would be one of fear and horror and for a very understandable reason-my life would be over. Someone would exist who would be just like me, but this is small consolation, for after all, I would no longer survive.

While the threat of physical annihilation is perhaps the most blatant cause for fear and horror, one’s life can be eradicated in other ways. One’s life-story or life-narrative may become so disrupted that, from a first-person perspective, one isn’t sure whose life if any is being lived.2 To speak of a life-narrative is helpful for it reminds us of an important truth-a truth that commonly receives little or no attention in contemporary discussions of personal identity, viz. that persons are socialcreatures. That is, what a person is, is constituted at least in part, by his social relationships and surroundings. And, what is equally important, persons know this. That we know this, is rarely a matter of overt proclamation, but rather is manifested by the way we act. Our lives are dramas, melodramas, comedies, or combinations of these and other narrative forms. And, naturally enough we play the major role. But what constitutes that role, is essentially a matter of the supporting cast-our peers, co-workers, friends, and lovers. Some persons play a

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more important role than others. These central characters form thecore of our social relationships and tend to have the greatest impact upon the matter in which we think of ourselves. Since the way in which one thinks of oneself is largely a matter of how he thinks others think of him, it is unsurprisingly to find one confused, even incoherent when his closest social relationships cease. When persons who form the core of one’s social sphere disappear from that sphere, one’s own sense of uniqueness or identity becomes seriously threatened. Also, at such times, introspection is common; not in hopes of finding a Humean impression, but rather to try to regain his feet with his social community.

There is an epistemic analogue to this sense of self that is a product of socialization. If a person’s core beliefs are shown false or contradictory he would suffer an epistemic crisis. The dearer the beliefs, the closer they are to the very core of his epistemic life, the more threatened his epistemic life becomes. When one’s important social relationships radically change, the person starts to question who he is, while when one’s dearest epistemic beliefs radically change he starts to question what he knows and what hecan know. The two points are not unrelated, and so a similarity in the symptomology isn’t surprising. Doubts about your own rationality are doubts about your identity. Social crises can often be cast as epistemic crises.

This helps explain why Nancy* isn’t an acceptable substitute for Nancy. And surely if Nancy* is not, no person is. Loving someone, is among other things, an expression of our identity, of our uniqueness in the world around us. If the object of our love vanishes, even if she is replaced by an indistinguishable twin, our own status as a unique individual is threatened.

Obviously, loving another person will form part of the fuzzy-edged core of one’s social relationships. There are other, more peripheral relationships that we have toward objects, and not persons, that share some of the same characteristics. Perhaps the foregoing analysis will help us better understand these other relationships.

Consider what your reaction and attitude would be upon discovering that the painting that you will soon view will not be Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa as you had expected, but rather some remarkable forgery. Assume that we have conclusive independent evidence to justify our belief that the original has been destroyed, and that this indistinguishable, painting is not a Da Vinci at all. So instead of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa we will have Da Vinci*’s Mona Lisa*. Again our attitude would be one of disappointment and we would think that we will suffer a substantive loss.

One might argue that these reactions are easily explicable since, although the two paintings are qualitatively indistinguishable, the

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visual experiences differ. Our knowledge that we are not seeing a Da Vinci but merely a Da Vinci’ depreciates the quality of the visual experience. To extricate ourselves from these murky waters where we bring something to the aesthetic experience, let us suppose that only after we have seen the painting are we presented with this revelation. Thus at the time of viewing the painting our beliefs are the very same that we would have if we were to see the original Mona Lisa. It now seems implausible to claim that the visual experiences differ-what would be the cause for such a disparity?

It appears as if the only explanation for our attitudes lies in the fact that there is a different author for each of the two paintings. But why should this matter? Recall that it did not seem to carry any weight to explicate my sorrow of losing Nancy. That is, the fact that the authors (i.e. parents) of Nancy* were different that those of Nancy didn’t figure in my sense of loss or disappointment. Why does the point of origin make the substantial difference with our reactions in the case of an artifact while not mattering in the case of a person whom I love. And secondly what repercussions, if any does this difference in the two cases have?

The machinery developed gives us a method of understanding these perplexing aesthetic attitudes. The sorrow experienced might be best viewed as an expression of one’s uncertainty about his identity. And the reason why the discovery that Da Vinci was not the creator of the viewed painting is so saddening, (and maddening) is that the largest part of our sense of social identity comes from our interactions, direct and indirect with other persons. Da Vinci forms part of our history, our narrative, Da Vinci’did not. Similarly, but much less importantly, the Mona Lisa is part of our history while the Mona Lisa* is not. The disappointment can be rationalized only when we realize that our attitude isn’t a reflection of a denigrated aesthetic experience (for these are, ex hypothesi, qualitatively identical), but is, rather, an expression of how we see ourselves as part of a particular narrative. Our relative lack of concern for Nancy’s origin is explicable by the fact that her parents lie outside the core relationships of our social identity. Nancy, being a person 1 love, and so playing a crucial constitutive role in my social self, is virtually irreplaceable, while her parents playing a relatively insignificant role matter very little.

The upshot of this is that persons, in the main, matter most in our lives, and that what is of great importance of a particular artifact as opposed to its indistinguishable double lies in the fact that a particular, unique person created it. Particular persons are crucially significant to us, not because they exhibit certain qualities, but because they exhibit certain qualities-and, as we have seen, this makes all the difference in the world in how it is that we think about our~elves .~

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NOTES

I This intuition is shared by Kripke. Cf. “Naming and Necessity” in Semantics of Natural Lnnguages, Harman and Davidson (eds.), 1972, p. 3 14.

2 For a complementary viewpoint, see A.C. Maclntyre’s “Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science” in Paradigms and Revolurions, Gutting (ed.), 1980, pp. 453-472.

3 My thanks to Nancy Daley for much of the inspiration for this paper.

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