Harry Frankfurter contends that “the key to a fulfilled life is to pursue wholeheartedly what one cares about, that love is the most authoritative form of caring, and that the purest form of love is, in a complicated way, self-love.” He breaks his book, The Reasons of love into three parts: How Should We Live; On Love and Its Reasons; The Dear Self. Here, I will succinctly restate his argument of his first part, How Should We Live.
Frankfurt first starts out by posing the question: how should we live to the reader. He indicates that issues as how one should live are within the realm of practical reasoning. Essentially the question, how should we live can be translated into: how one ought to decide what actions to take? In other words, how we should live is predominately guided by moral evaluation. Frankfurt notes however, that morality is not and should not be the final guide to which we conform our conduct. Somehow we have decided as a society that “the demands of morality are the inherently preemptive measurement.” Frankfurt argues that this should not be the case.
He argues that “reasonable and respectable people find that other things may sometimes mean more . . . and make stronger claims upon them than morality.” Thus, “authoritative reasoning about what to do and how to behave” are not “limited to moral deliberation.” Therefore, we should adopt a theory of normative practical reasoning that is more inclusive regarding the types of deliberation regarding how we should live. Having demonstrated that we should adapt a normative mode of practical reasoning, Frankfurt goes on to argue that to adequately analyze the question of how one ought to live, we should consider the “most elementary as well as the most indispensable resources of peoples wants (“desire”).” However, to just observe what people want and draw from such their motives and ascribe principles accordingly is insufficient.
Rather, it is “both more precise and more fully explanatory to say that there is something we care about or . . . we regard as important to ourselves.” It is in certain cases what moves an us to act is a “notable variant of caring” which is love. Frankfurt argues, thus in order to expand the theory of practical reasoning beyond that or morality we must include: what we care about, what is important to use, and what we love. Indeed, “the notion of caring is in large part constructed out of the notion of desire.” However, as Frankfurt notes “many of our desires are utterly inconsequential” and it is not the intensity of the desire that translates to one caring.
What constitutes caring is that one is willingly committed to their desire. “The desire does not move him either against his will or without his endorsement.” Instead, the individual is “prepared to intervene” to ensure that the desires continues. This is done by our ability to reflect on our “thoughts, desires, and attitudes” concerning the object of our desire. In other words, we have the ability to want to want an object of desire and to want not to want an object. This higher ability of reflection pertains to our motives. Thus, for an individual to be said to have acted freely in caring about something, they must be motived by their desire and content to be moved to act on said desire.
— Yours Truly,
Michael A. Westbrook
Ivory Tower 