Blog Post: The Semi-Romantic Philosophy of Sabrina Carpenter

In a recent video, I said I was a fan of the pop musician Sabrina Carpenter. This took some people by surprise, given that I often sound like I’ve just walked off the set of a 1970s comedy about excessively posh people. But in fact, I consider Sabrina Carpenter one of the most interesting popular thinkers on the subject of love currently writing today. And today I would like to explain why. I actually plan to write a whole video on existential themes in Carpenter’s music, but this will give you an idea of why I find her so interesting.

It largely connects to my general view on the state of love in the modern day. Put simply, I think that our modern attitudes towards love are caught between two camps: one vaguely idealist, and the other staunchly naturalist. From our past we have inherited various ideas about love. We still talk about soulmates, and people being "destined to be together”. We intertwine our notions of romantic love with fate, narrative, and teleology. I don’t think this is particularly surprising. So many of our narratives about love come from time periods where these ideas were far more in vogue. Take the idea of “The One” for example. We can trace this notion at least as far back as Aristophanes, who says the following in Plato’s Symposium:

“Let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature... The primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond…Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods...Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts, as they had done the giants… At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way…[He] cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another”

The idea then is that we spend our lives seeking our “other halves”. You can see how much idealism and metaphysics has to be invoked in order to keep this idea of love afloat. It involves gods, fate, design, and destiny. As Simon May argues in Love: A History, many of our modern ideas about romantic love stem from Christian ideas that were originally intended to apply to God. These include the redemptive power of love and the idea that love is a powerful, almost agentic force working in the background of the universe (okay, arguably that last one comes from even earlier work by Empedocles, but it’s not like that is any more naturalistic).

So we have all of these metaphysically-tinged ideas about love that have, for many people, lost their foundations. Fewer and fewer people believe in fate or destiny, and even religious people seem (in my experience) to be hesitant to assign God the role of romantic matchmaker (perhaps it is the concerns about freewill). So many of us are left carrying around these inherited ideas, without being able to really justify them.

Our other ideas about love come from a broad naturalism about human beings. Under this view, humans are not creatures with sparks of the divine in their hearts, nor are we made in the image of God, nor are we reflections of the form of the Human. Instead, we are contingently evolved beings, whose behaviour is the outcome of a complex set of natural factors like evolutionary pressures, social influences, and what we had for breakfast that morning. On this view nothing is “fated” (except perhaps in the mere sense of “determined by causes”). We are placed in a purposeless universe, and so-called “human nature” is the result of this intentionless process, not a matter of divine providence.

This is a very different idea of the human being, and one that is woefully unfit to support all of those ideals about love we were just talking about. If humans had a “One” that was fated to appear for us, then we should expect us to be endlessly thrilled with our lover, and for “problems” to only occur between ill-fated pairings. We should expect to be exclusively attracted to people who are, in some sense, “good for us”. We should think that the course of our romantic relationships is like the plot of a film, where it is all building towards a final, climatic moment - the culmination of all our desires and the banishment of all our woes.

But what should we expect if human beings are the product of “blind watchmaking”? Well, any number of things! We should expect our amorous behaviour (viewed at the species-level) to be shaped by our ancient evolutionary environment. At the individual level, we should expect people’s behaviours to reflect a confluence of natural and social factors, like upbringing, previous relationships, idiosyncratic experiences, and cultural assumptions. There is no reason a priori to think that love is fated, or destined, or that we will necessarily be happy in our relationships (luckily, we have empirical evidence that happy relationships are possible, just not necessary). We should also expect that human romantic behaviour (speaking generally) should have a lot to do with sex and sexual attraction, motivations that we have historically seen as vaguely “unclean”.

This all means that a lot of us have a conception of love that can only be fulfilled by a metaphysics we do not believe in. Our romantic values are idealistic, whereas our picture of the world is naturalistic. The Nietzsche scholar Bernard Reginster uses the term “nihilism of despair” to refer to this kind of situation: where our ideal has been “disproven” by our wider conception of the world, but we still stubbornly hold onto the ideal. It is similar to someone who truly believes that faith in God is the only thing that will make their life worth living, but has lost their faith and cannot get it back.

But what does this have to do with Sabrina Carpenter? Well, in my mind, her music often innovatively displays this tension within our conception of love. Take the following line from Please Please Please:

“I know I have good judgement, I know I have good taste

It’s funny and it’s ironic, that only I feel that way”

These lines (and indeed, the whole of Please Please Please) reflects the frustration at being attracted to someone who, deep down, you really think you should not be. Later in the song we see the contrast between Carpenter’s ideal of love, and what she (almost despite herself) has desired:

“Well, I have a fun idea, babe, maybe just stay inside

I know you're craving some fresh air, but the ceiling fan is so nice

And we could live so happily if no one knows that you're with me

I'm just kidding, but really, really, really”

There is a fundamental tension between the ideal of domestic bliss - the kind of thing Carpenter could proudly display to other people as reflecting the virtues of love - and her actual situation, where she is attracted to a man who she implicitly finds “embarassing”. She is embarrassed that she is not living up to this romantic ideal, because (as we would expect under naturalism) her attraction does not just reflect what is “good for her”.

We see the same idea in Manchild, where she says the following:

“Why so sexy if so dumb? And

Why survive the Earth so long”

And later on, she says this:

“Oh I like my boys playing hard to get

And I like my men all incompetent

And I swear they choose me, I’m not choosing them”

The irony, of course, being that she is choosing them. Her attraction, once again, goes against her better nature. She is striving for an ideal, but here naturalistic humanity pulls her back down to earth. More than that, Carpenter acknowledges that she cannot control what she is attracted to. She is not just stuck feeling attraction for those who might be “bad for her”, but it is entirely at the hands of a part of her that is only barely in her conscious control. From Dumb and Poetic, we get the following:

“You’re so dumb and poetic

It’s just what I fall for, I like the aesthetic”

“It’s just what I fall for” reflects a kind of frustrating fatalism in Carpenter’s conception of love and of attraction that makes sense under a naturalistic worldview. If we do feel “animal attraction” for one another, why would we expect that to be subservient to the rational parts of our mind? And if this is not ordained by fate, but merely determined by an uncaring universe, then why should we expect the attraction we feel to be in our best interests?

This is an idea reflected in the work of one of my favourite writers, Stendhal. In The Red and The Black, we continually see people loving and desiring those who are not good for them, sometimes precisely because they are not good for them, and being frustrated at this fact. The same theme comes up in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, where (spoiler alert) the very potential for self-destruction is part of what draws Emma Bovary into her second adultery. Carpenter continues these frustrations into the totally different context of the information age.

And this is not the only tension between idealistic and naturalistic love that Carpenter explores. We also see it in her continual frustration with lust. Take, for example, the following section from Go Go Juice:

“I’m just drinking to call someone

Ain’t nobody safe when I’m a little bit drunk

Could be John or Larry, Gosh

Who’s to say?

Or the one that rhymes with ‘villain’

If I’m feeling that way”

This lust is then accompanied with rejection, as she describes being met with disinterest, and feigning apathy:

“If you’re still disinterested in me, well fuck

Just trying different numbers, didn’t think that you’d pick up”

These, again, are frustrations of a naturalistic conception of love and attraction, which must admit its relationship to the sexual element too. All of this is done with a kind of charming and refreshing self-awareness. Carpenter is not saying “I have pure, romantically ideal intentions, and am continually being thwarted by the capricious intentions of others”, she instead includes herself in her naturalistic, slightly cynical assessment of love. She is not the scorned angel, but an active participant in thwarting her own designs.

Hoover, it would be too hasty to call Carpenter something like a “romantic nihilist”. The thing I find so interesting about Carpenter’s music is that she is often trying to construct a new ideal for love, that is sufficiently aware of the natural, almost animal element in human attraction. In Juno she seems to actively be trying to balance the instinctive aspect of attraction with a new romantic ideal. As she puts it:

“You make me wanna make you fall in love

Oh late at night ‘m thinking ‘about you

Wanna try out my fuzzy pink handcuffs?”

And later on:

“You know I just might

Let you lock be down tonight

One of me is cute, but two though?"

In both of these sections, Carpenter melds animal attraction with long-term commitment, and even the eventual creation of a family. There is an attempt to incorporate the known naturalistic elements of human attraction with an ideal of love still worth striving after. It’s not a nihilistic message, it is arguably trying to construct a slightly different image of what fulfilled love means.

At the end of her newest album, Man’s Best Friend, she addresses her breakup with her ex-boyfriend, Barry Keoghan, who is also (probably) the subject spoken about in Juno. The album finishes with the song Goodbye, where she both laments the breakup, and seems hopeful for the future. Despite its melancholic subject, the actual tone of the end of the song is relatively upbeat. Carpenter seems confident in her ability to weather this storm. And importantly, there is no sense that she is giving up on love itself. She is saying goodbye to one person, not the concept of romance itself.

And I think this is what appeals to me about Sabrina Carpenter’s music. She doesn’t shy away from the more embarrassing aspects of romance, and specifically romance in the modern day. She is more than willing to point the finger at herself. Yet at the same time, she is not a doomer about things. There is a real optimism to her music.

I do think that the question Carpenter’s music is implicitly wrestling with: the reconciliation of old romantic ideals with modern naturalism, is something many of us will have to confront in our own lives. So it’s nice to have some good music to accompany us along the way.

Of course, I could be reading far too much into this. But that wouldn’t be like me at all.