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Notes -
That is not just how it goes.
Do you believe that human emotions exist?
It's pretty close to how it goes.
I should certainly think so! I'd wager I'm at least 2-sigma above the mean in terms of the intensity and variety of emotions I experience on a daily basis.
Given that you cannot imagine the love that a man and woman would have for one another in a relationship, I doubt this.
A couple things:
One, I'm not sure what I said that gave you this impression. Presumably you thought my description of the typical relationship as "an exchange of resources for sex" somehow precluded the presence of love in such a relationship. But I never said that.
Two, I'm not sure how my conception of love is relevant to the task of determining what critics of prostitution find morally blameworthy about prostitution. Maybe your claim is that a prostitution transaction is devoid of love, and is thereby deficient. Ok, that may very well be true. But deficiency is not the same as blameworthiness. I don't see why the loveless prostitute should be a "predator" and a "demon" simply because she is loveless. She's not stopping you from falling in love with whoever you please! Lots of people are deficient in all sorts of things. The man who drives an old beat up car is using a deficient mode of transportation in comparison to the man who drives a new sports car, but there's nothing morally blameworthy about driving an old car. Not everyone has to own everything and experience everything, and that's ok!
Furthermore, I find the assertion that the prostitute is necessarily loveless to be rather presumptuous. I see no reason why there couldn't be someone she loves; perhaps even her clients.
I really want to explore your claim about feeling more emotions than other people, but also imagining a romantic relationship as purely transactional.
Can you expand on this?
I said that it was transactional. I didn't say it was purely transactional. There's a difference.
I previously shared some of my thoughts on love in general here. The most relevant bit is this:
Transactions are a reality; love is an absurdity, if not an outright impossibility. Love has value only and precisely because it is absurd.
I occasionally become impatient with people who glibly assert that they are "in love" without realizing that they are uttering an absurdity (or without realizing that, statistically speaking, their relationship probably won't last the year). This is not at all to say that people shouldn't love; it is only to say that it should be done self-consciously rather than than unconsciously.
It has long since penetrated popular consciousness that "justice" is an open and apophatic concept. Any assertion that such and such an act is "just" can be met with "ah, but what is justice? Whose justice? Is that really justice?" I am simply opening the possibility of a similar discourse on love. At least as far back as Plato's Symposium, it has been recognized that love is not (just) an emotion but a discursive concept which can and should be subject to critique (critique not in the sense of "mere" criticism, or dismissal, or negation -- but rather critique in the sense of a coming to self-consciousness, a laying bare of the groundwork and the conditions of possibility). To assume that we know love when we feel it is presumptuous. We can always interrogate whether any emotion, action, or other particular entity is an instantiation of the general concept of love, whether the conditions of instantiation of love can ever be met at all, etc.
One can feel and experience many things; but whether and how these feelings can be mapped to concepts should not be decided too hastily.
Pinging @Stellula, as it may be relevant to their interests.
Can you name a type of human interaction that is not "transactional" in some way? If I talk to a stranger, is that not in some sense transactional? When I catch some random family's baby staring at me in the grocery store and begin making silly faces to try to get them to laugh, is that not clearly "transactional"? When I have lunch together with a friend, is that not transactional in some sense?
You seem to be claiming that there's the set of human interactions, and then a subset of transactional human interactions, and then a sub-subset of purely transactional human interactions. But if in fact all human interaction is transactional, and then a subset is purely transactional, then the "transactional" label adds nothing meaningful to the term "interaction", and the joint in reality is the "purely", the compartmentalization and formalization of an interaction, and with it the exclusion and severing of other possible connections and relations and interactions. We "transact" because we wish for more interaction with someone, and the "more" is open-ended. We "purely transact" with someone because we want a specific interaction and no more. These two modes of transaction are notably distinct.
Perhaps, if we confine ourselves to abstractions, though I'm skeptical that this is actually an accurate description at the object level.
I would not agree with this formulation, so far as I understand the argument; it seems to be a false dichotomy emerging excessive abstraction. The dichotomy is drawn between the instrumental "I love them for the characteristics they possess" and the arbitrary "I love them for for some ineffable, arbitrary themness", but there is a third option: "I love them because I have loved them." In this, the instrumental emerges from and utterly overtakes the arbitrary, while being inextricable from it.
Put a grain of sand into an oyster and wait, and the result often enough is a pearl. Pearls do not form without the grain of sand, but pearls are not themselves reducible to grains of sand. They are an accretion, a composite, of which the sand is a foundation but of which the foundation is far, far less than what is built upon it, like an inverted pyramid. One might describe them better as an investment.
My relationship with my wife began in a quite arbitrary fashion; having been acquaintances for a few years, we spent some time together at a church event and hit it off over a common love for movies, books and video games. On the other hand, this arbitrariness was only possible from an explicitly-instrumental foundation: we found each other because we were both actively looking for a sane, stable, committed Christian of the opposite sex to build a family with, and also there was some amount of behind-the-scenes matchmaking from mutual friends nudging things along.
The love we share now does not rest significantly on our common love for movies, books and video games. Nor is it based solely the instrumental desire for marriage and a family; we no longer want marriage in the abstract, we want this marriage, and our love were persist even if we were unable to have children. What it rests on is nearly a decade of choices made and actions taken out of love for one another: in-jokes, acts of kindness, acts of service, shared hardship, shared joy, shared knowledge, and so on and on. Further, these have accrued because neither of us acted as though these were "purely transactional", nor did transactionality enter the calculus in any significant way; we do the things we do because each of us perceive that such acts will please and support the other. I want my wife to be happy and to have a good life, and she wants the same for me, and the longer these objectives guide our actions the more solid and substantial our love grows, and the less we recognize a good apart from the good found in each other.
This appears to me to be sophistry through a retreat to arbitrary abstraction.
What does that definition mistakenly contain that we might better remove? What does that definition lack that we might wish to add? It tells us that love is a terminal value, and it defines that love is and is not. In what way is any of this "unsayable"?
I share this impatience, because such people are generally not describing Love but infatuation.
Just so. But equally, to claim that we do not know love when we have practiced it as an intentional way of life is sophistry. Certainly not all questions have answers, but just as certainly some questions do have answers, and this is one of them. Why ask questions if you don't want answers?
I'm not blowing you off; I just don't have the time in the day to keep responding to everyone for now. I may take some select points here and respond to them in a future top level post.
Please do, I am frequently compelled to do the same and understand completely.
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