ISOLATOES

A recent news story has provided fodder for comedians.  It’s about a practice for which new words had to be invented:  “Solomoon” was one, “Unimoon” another. Despite the suffix, the practice has nothing to do with celestial bodies. It’s about changes in what used to be called “honeymoon.”

What’s indicated by “uni” and “solo”?  Getting married and taking separate holidays. A New York Times story got  the buzz going.

Sociologically, the trend is understandable.  Many couples, at the time of their wedding, have already got years of shared living behind them.  The post-wedding trip is just another vacation. Some vacations work best together, some apart.

Philosophically, the move is also understandable. It’s part and parcel of an important, post-medieval, shift in self-definition.  The ancient world had been overly focused on community. Community, in turn, meant rigid and oppressive social roles. Modern European thought offered an alternative: individualism.

As is often the case, a pendulum swing from one extreme can, after many centuries, move far in the opposite direction.  A dominating strand now thinks of humans as fundamentally, essentially, basically, individuated units. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick coined an appropriate term: “isolatoes.”

For an ancient thinker like Aristotle, this simply falsified our experience. Humans were “political animals.” By this Aristotle

did not mean that we all aspire to political office.  He meant that humans were, by nature, social entities. “Isolatoes” were either gods or beasts. Humans, after all, come into existence only after the conjunction of sperm and egg, gestate in a female, live in communities, speak a language, and are not totipotent (i.e. need others). Those who think of themselves as fundamentally isolated and autonomous can be described as idiotic, using a word whose Greek root means “personal,”  “peculiar,” “private.”

Because our mode of being is social, one great good for humans is friendship. “Even a rich man,” Aristotle said, “needs friends.” Friendship, as Aristotle described it,  exists on a continuum. There is (a) the optimal sense of friendship in which people wish the best for each other and occasion mutual transformation toward the better.  Other friendships are (b) those of “enjoyment,” when the companionship is based on the pleasant company of others; and (c) companionship built around services that people provide for one another. Optimal friendship is rare, but, like 20-20 vision, remains the aspirational norm.  

Where there is friendship, Aristotle also claimed, there is no need for justice. Aristotle does not mean that friends will be unfair to each other. He is saying that, in friendship, disagreements can be resolved without fixed, antecedent codes of law.  Such codifications, i.e. contracts, are needed when the relationship is less than that of friendship in the fullest sense.

Key strands in Modern philosophy altered this Aristotelian landscape.  Humans are not inherently social, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau (1712-1778) and John Locke (1632-1704) will argue.  Humans are basically separate units, wholly independent in the state of nature. As inheritors of this tradition, it makes sense that our practices would include honeymoons alone.  This trend follows a pattern traced by the Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone. It also helps explain the growing phenomenon of eating alone.

Within such a setting, contractualism, rather than being a second-best arrangement, now becomes primary. Pan-contractualism becomes the order of the day.  All relations are envisioned through the lens of contract.

This means that even for friendship, the older Aristotelian continuum fades away. What Aristotle considered second-best now becomes the general default.

The special friendship called marriage has to make its way in this new semantic landscape. As a result, the two individuals will (1) think of  themselves as primarily autonomous units; (2) consider their partnership on the model of a contract; (3) assume the relationship has been entered into for some combination of Aristotle’s two lesser forms of friendship, pleasant companionship and mutual usefulness; (4) marginalize, if not ignore entirely, the Aristotelian outcome of mutual transformation.

At the time of the wedding, if no contractual clause precludes separate post-wedding trips, then why not, especially if such honeymoon-alone arrangements serve to foster greater enjoyment or utility.

Honeymoon alone, bowling alone, eating alone.  There is a trend here. It’s not a trend that comes from nowhere.  It has been prepared by a paradigm shift in philosophical anthropology. The main ingredients of that shift: humans as primarily isolatoes, pan-contractualism, understandings of friendship that overlook Aristotle’s optimal type, concentrating on enjoyment and utility. Given the new climate of opinion it’s kind of surprising that it took so long for the monomoon trend to emerge.