You meet someone and, inexplicably, fall in love. Assuming the feeling is mutual and neither of you are spoken for, you have two options: date them, or don’t. (An oversimplification of contemporary hookup culture, but let’s ignore that.) How do you choose what to do?
You’d like to think of yourself as a rational actor. Matters of the heart are no exception. Therefore, you should apply normative decision theory to envision possible actions, the outcome of each action, and the value of each outcome, then act to achieve the highest value. In most of the myriad choices you make daily—what to wear, what to eat, what to do on a Friday night—this process occurs so seamlessly that its steps become indistinguishable.
Yet, applied to your conundrum, the rulebook for rational behavior falls apart. Option two is simple. You stay single, possibly wracked with longing and wondering what could’ve been, but the path is predictably continuous. Option one is not. Without dating this person, you can’t imagine what the outcome would be—you, like Sappho, know love is a “sweetbitter unmanageable creature” promising pleasure and pain in equal portion. Moreover, the value that you, overcome by desire, place on dating them might differ from your sober judgement. Falling in love makes you strange to yourself. Recalling past relationships, you find your old preferences unrecognizable, as though there were no static basis from which to determine the right self to act on.
Choosing to date someone falls into the category of “transformative experience,” defined by philosopher L. A. Paul in her eponymous monograph. Such experiences are transformative both epistemically and personally. Epistemically, they confer knowledge that is otherwise inaccessible. Personally, they alter your point of view, reconfiguring who you believe yourself to be around a new set of preferences. The transformative nature of romantic relationships makes it impossible for you to approach this question with normative decision theory—you don’t know what dating the person will be like or who you will become with them, so “you cannot rationally choose to have the experience, nor can you rationally choose to avoid it.”
Having condemned you to the cauldron of irrationality and indecision, Paul offers a way out. Rather than fastening your decision to an evaluation of its outcome, you can move the locus of arbitration to the experience of dating them. The question shifts from, Do you want to date them? to, Do you want to know what it’s like to date them? Potential pleasure or pain become irrelevant. “The valuation need not be based on … the qualitative feel of the experience. The value is, instead, based on the revelation the experience involves.” Choosing revelation is “a commitment … to discovery,” to learning something new as an end in itself. In that, it is not so different from the purest form of education.
Paul, being a philosopher, must be predisposed to value knowledge for its own sake. You, being less so, are still on the fence. But, by the fact of being in love, you do implicitly value something for its own sake: the beauty of your beloved. You could spend hours gazing at them; maybe you already have. Held in the act of staring is an orientation towards knowledge, argues literary critic Elaine Scarry in On Beauty and Being Just.
When you stare at the object of your love, the impulse to keep looking arises from and goes nowhere. It is a self-satisfying activity, like a circle directed at its own continuation. Their beauty is true and, beyond the coincidental relationship of a noun to an adjective, shares with truth a definitional self-evidentness. No one had to explain this person’s beauty to you; you simply knew. That certainty is attendant to falling in love—you love them because they are beautiful, and they are beautiful because you love them.
Momentary feelings have led you to a centuries-old aesthetic observation. Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Scarry elaborates, “This is not to say that what is beautiful is also true … but rather that it ignites the desire for truth by giving us, with an electric brightness shared by almost no other uninvited, freely arriving perceptual event, the experience of conviction.” Beauty prompts the very commitment to discovery that Paul suggests. Choosing revelation is not a deliberation you must consciously make—in love, you have already made it.
Scarry goes a step further to propose there is a moral good in pursuing beauty. “One’s daily unmindfulness of the aliveness of others is temporarily interrupted in the presence of a beautiful person, alerting us to the requirements placed on us by the aliveness of all persons.” Most days, you move routinely and look without seeing, familiar surroundings dulled into undifferentiated matter. Seeing this person, for the first or every time, your eyes hitch. The landscape fattens into three dimensions, shaken askew. Beauty compels your attention involuntarily and tasks you with extending that care to the wider world.
You’re almost on board now, but there is a loose thread in Scarry’s formulation that threatens to unravel its romanticism: if the initial experience of beauty is involuntary, how do you ensure it lasts? Could habituation consume your beloved, eroding them into another flat feature of the scenery? If beauty happens to you, where does that leave your agency?
Let’s say, before you met this person, you read “A Sunset” by Robert Hass. And let’s say, the last line—“In the dark / I thought of a radiant ordinariness / That burned, that burned and burned”—burned through your mind as you debated this dilemma.
Like you, Hass worries that something outside us could control our actions, wondering whether “it is the experience of beauty, / Not rules, not fear of consequences / Or reverence for authority, that informs / Our moral sense.” His ambivalence arises from entanglements between art and violence—World War I, the Holocaust, mass shootings—that imply a terrifying unreliability in surrendering judgement to the whims of beauty. After a hundred and seven lines writing himself into a frenzy over AR-15s, John Ashbery, King Lear, Wagner, water lilies, Marvel movies, and Walt Whitman, Hass ends on the same sunset from the titular start.
While the stagnant content implies doubt that beauty can guide morality, the poem’s form betrays the soft core of its belief. Until the hundredth line, Hass couches his declarations in stuttering conditionals—“this may be where,” “perhaps there was,” “it could have”—such that it sounds less like a poem, more like bumbling stage directions. Meanwhile, a stylistic tick reveals each trick of the poem’s structure—“I could take a hard right here,” “The next veering,” “I need to return to the subject”—as though it wants to preempt subconscious influence on the reader, disavowing art’s effect in the same breath that it asks, “Is there a practice of the arts / … that would form / A mind or heart in which those young bodies / On the classroom floor had become / Unimaginable, from a love of the good / As ordinary as the children’s tennis shoes?”
The poem answers, “Probably not.” But in the final seven lines, its cynicism slips. “Here’s another hard right turn. Think”: Hass confronts his reader for the first time. The only other mention of your presence was hidden in the opening image. Between the weight of morality and aesthetics, Hass allows two lines, “Of brief but astonishing beauty, / If you happened to be paying attention.” The experience of beauty is conditional—it doesn’t awaken attention, as Scarry says, but depends on a pre-existing practice of it. Therein lies the transformative choice.
Really, I didn’t need to know philosophy to choose when I fell in love, months ago. All I knew was that he had a proclivity for twirling between his steps, that he could recite “Ulysses” with enough ferocity to move a body of water, and that he looked unbearably good in a grey coat. Bearing nothing but an allegiance to beauty, I chose. It was easy.
Image: Paula Modersohn-Becker, Birch Trunk, oil on paperboard, 1902-1903 (Paula Modersohn-Becker Museum, Bremen, Germany).