Reconciling Eros and Agape

Alan Soble wrote this essay as a response to Singer's essay on bestowal and appraisal.  He points out that a lot of Singer's arguments on the nature of love are contradictory. These essays mainly focus on the 2 different types of love: eros and agape,  They explore how these types of love are involved in personal love between two people.  Singer claims that personal love is a reconciliation of eros and agape, while Soble thinks that humans are incapable of agapic love.

Singer thinks that personal love is a reconciliation of eros and agape.  At first the lover falls in love with the other person based on their merits. This type of love at the beginning of the relationship is erosic love. Once the relationship develops to a deeper level, the lover bestows value onto the person. This bestowal is agapic love, because the lover is creating value in the other person that is not based on appraisal of their positive traits.  Soble disagrees with this idea that personal love has an element of agape.  He says that humans are incapable of agapic love, because all love is based on finding traits we admire and value in another person.  Although we might later create value through bestowal, the first step in getting to that "agapic" love was based on appraisal.  True agapic love wouldn't require any appraisal. The idea that personal love involves appraisal is contradictory to the idea that humans are capable of agapic love.

The main question I had when reading this was whether or not humans are capable of bestowing value even when they have a negative appraisal of the person.  My first reaction was that humans are incapable of loving someone they have a negative appraisal of.  However, when I was talking about this with a friend, he mentioned that priests offer forgiveness to murderers and other evil people. This forgiveness is a form of bestowing value, even though the priest might have a negative appraisal of the person.

This idea that humans are incapable of love without appraisal makes it confusing when we try to define the necessary conditions of love.  Even though Singer says that appraisal plays a part in all personal love, he doesn't count appraisal as a necessary condition of love.  He rejects the idea that appraisal is a necessary condition of love because God loves all humans regardless of whether or not they deserve it. The fact that this kind of love can exist without the involvement of appraisal means that love must be able to exist without appraisal.

Bestowal, on the other hand, is a necessary condition of love according to Singer.  What I think he means by this is that whenever someone loves someone else they create value in them that wasn't there before.  However, this doesn't seem to be able to apply to humans relationship with God.  Because God is already perfect, they cannot create new value in him that wasn't there before.  He had already reached the highest possible value that could ever possibly exist. In my opinion this either means that bestowal cannot be a necessary condition of love, or it means that humans are incapable of loving God.  

I disagree with Soble's idea that humans are incapable of agapic love.  I think that love that parents have for their children qualifies as agapic love.  Parents love their children without appraising their positive merits, and they create value in them based on the fact that they love them.  In class, someone said that a parent's love for their children does not count as agapic, because a parent's love for their child is really an extension of love for themselves.  However, if we are using God as the example of agapic love, and we are following the typical Christian belief that God is the creator of humans and he created them in his image, it seems like his love for humans would just be an extension of love for himself.