Friendship, love, and experience

Linda Bell

pp. 195-211

in: Linda Fisher, Lester Embree (eds), Feminist phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

Since this paper is part of a symposium on feminist phenomenology, I choose to focus on the role of experience in the feminist framing of ideals like friendship and love. My thesis is that an uncritical use of experience will lead only to ideals that continue to reflect unexamined and unacceptable assumptions of our society. My strategy is, first, to discuss how an uncritical appeal to experience is problematic for settling various practical and philosophical issues and, second, guided by that discussion, to analyze specific appeals to experience in support of views of friendship and love, one from an acknowledged anti-feminist and the other my own.