The Rationality of Love

by Hichem Naar

Love has been the subject of much fascination. It is indeed one of those things which elude us in many ways. The long-lasting disagreement over love's nature is unsurprising. In light of this, a piecemeal approach to love is in order. Instead of asking what love is down the line, we might need to investigate its various features and its connection to other things. The Rationality of Love addresses the question whether love belongs, paradoxically enough, to the realm of reason, whether love belongs to the class of responses, such as belief and action, that admit of norms of justification and rationality. Are there normative reasons to love someone? Can it be an appropriate or fitting response to an individual? Can it be rational? Or is love, like perceptual experiences, sensations and urges, the sort of thing we just have and for which we cannot be rationally criticizable? Hichem Naar provides a sustained defense of the rationality of love. There are reasons to love others,
reasons provided by the unique value of each individual. This will in turn rule out popular accounts of love which deny love's rationality and vindicate those accounts that make room for it.

Drawing on various domains of philosophical inquiry such as the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of normativity, and epistemology, Naar provides a careful assessment of the various positions in the debate over reasons for love and develops his own answer to the normative question about love.

192 pages, Hardcover

Published February 1, 2023

Reviews

[James Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm new to the topic. So, please take the following with a pinch of salt.

In this book Naar provides a solid defence of the rationality of love. I really enjoyed reading it. Clear arguments are provided, as are relevant details from recent debates.

I felt inspired by the author’s account, even if I was ultimately unconvinced by it. Each person is a ‘world’ because they bear the unique property of their own subjectivity. This property acts as a reason to love them, assuming certain enabling conditions obtain (e.g., I’ve achieved sufficient first-hand experience of them). Specifically, love is a fitting response to this person's specific value, regardless of whether it's an emotion, attitude, disposition, or something else.* I guess I just fail to see why the beloved’s unique viewpoint explains love. Sure, it explains why love is selective (it cannot be transferred between persons). But, surely, it cannot do sufficient explanatory work to be a reason to love. Still, I was inspired by Naar's ideas and the construction of his arguments.

Unfortunately, the writing and editing don't always do justice to the view. Chapter 2 is particularly flustered. The end is rushed. Across the book there are far too many footnotes, some of which are enormous. There's a non-insignificant number of errors (e.g., missing or extra words). The reader has to wait an excessive amount of time to hear details of the view being proposed; some examples early on would have been nice to indicate what the view will look like before it starts to take shape. When really interesting aspects of the view begin to emerge, they're left for future consideration. Lastly, while I respect the need to be intellectually humble, sometimes I wondered whether Naar could have been more assertive instead of considering a view to be merely ‘plausible’ or ‘implausible’.

For me, The Rationality of Love is a 3/5 book—which is a shame because it could have been a 4/5 book with better editing and a 5/5 book with a complete philosophical position!

* The fittingness relation being discussed often sounds like grounding. Yet this is never discussed.