Love Diaries #1 : reason in razzle dazzle?

Until recently, I have described love, being in love, experiencing love, and loving as an ineffable; unexplainable; mystical and magical kind of experience. When asked about my ideal romantic situation I generally respond by saying I want the kinds of relationships that have “razzle dazzle”. Recently I have been challenged to explain what that means.

“What is razzle dazzle exactly PBG?” “ What does it look like?”

While I stumbled to come up with an answer or just a simple explanation for the language I chose to use to describe my ideal romantic situation, I had the interesting realization that I actually had no idea what razzle dazzle meant. And more importantly, perhaps, I had never challenged myself to think critically about my reasons for love and loving. What guides my fantasies about the ideal romantic relationship? What exactly were my reasons?

If I could not answer these questions for another, how can I possibly truly access the love that I crave? Or perhaps better put, how could I love if I did not know what love is?

This is when I realized that perhaps I should begin to read about the philosophy of love.

You know.. for science.

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I started reading Love’s Vision by Troy Jollimore and he is all about reasons (or so he would have you believe… dun dun dun.. lol)

In his introduction and first chapter, he spends a good amount of time arguing against folks who hold an antirationalist perspective on love - those who would say that love and reason are at odds with one another. He argues that love always has reasons even if those reasons are not immediately clear to us. Simultaneously though, he argues that while there are reasons for love, we must allow space for those reasons to be irrational when appropriate. For Jollimore, it would seem that he is setting the stage for an argument that is focused on understanding love as something in between things - which to me reads very much like what I imagine razzle dazzle to be.

He goes on in the chapter to describe love as a way of seeing (see book title) For Jollimore, loving another person (and he is clear to make a distinction between the love of persons and the love of objects - persons are subjects - and in this book, he is only interested in the kind of love that involves people - which I feel is an important line to draw because often in these conversations about love we have a tendency to speak broadly which can limit critical discourse on love and loving among people) is both a positive and appreciative response to valuable properties in them, that loving is the kind of thing that catapults you into the world of another thus fundamentally altering your own experience of the world, that loving is a matter of reasons because it is a response to something external.

The most interesting bit in all of this though is while Jollimore talks about love being a way of seeing, he argues that love is also not seeing (the in-between) And I wonder with all his set up, with all this talk about reason.. how can this be - Why must we not see?

This is where I find myself with more questions than answers because I don’t disagree with any of this (obviously: see razzle razzle) I do believe love is about seeing, about valuable properties; about seeing and not seeing; about a response; and about irrationality (when appropriate) and all the other things he describes in the chapter - what puzzles me though is how any of it is at all rational?

I think I am more confused than when I started.

And I still can’t fully explain razzle dazzle.. but so far, Jollimore can’t fully explain love.

So I guess we’ll see.