Irving Singer was a philosopher whose Times obit (“Irving Singer, M.I.T. Professor Who Wrote ‘The Nature of Love,’ Dies at 89," NYT, 2/15/15) describes how he had written a three volume work devoted
to one of the most over used words in the English language, one whose definition
has stymied and challenged thinkers throughout history. The Times obit quotes Singer thusly, “This, like so many
philosophical works, began as an attempt to understand my own inadequacies.
Everyone in my family persuaded me that I ought to be more loving, which
troubled me. So like most philosophers, I dealt with the criticism by
constructing a theory and a philosophy which enabled me to dismiss their
ideas.” Singer who according to the Times
taught for many years at M.I.T. seems have had a sensibility that in many
respects was closer to that of humanistic psychologists like Erich Fromm who
wrote The Art of Loving, who also had a philosophical background (as a product of the Frankfurt school). On the basis of the obit, Singer did not appear to be a utilitarian or consequentialist like Peter Singer or Derek Parfitt.
He was not concerned with the kind of ethical problems that bugged trolleyologists like Philippa Foot and the description of his work in the obit
with its emphasis on emotion doesn’t seem to tie it to language philosophers or
the work of phenomenologists like Husserl or Heidegger. But the very inception
of Singer’s project makes one think about how other great works of philosophy
might have come into being. Did Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason derive the fact that his family found him to be was unreasonable?
Did Heidegger’s Being and Time result
from the philosopher’s problems with lateness or in the case of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, a great mind’s inability to deal with
varying kinds of absence (God, money, an empty cupboard). Could Sartre’s
existentialism and his obsession with nothingness have derived from the fact that
when he was was a little boy, he frequently came home to an empty refrigerator?
