“You’re Nobody ‘Til Somebody Loves You,” is a popular song composed in 1944 by Larry Stork. The lyrics were supplied by the team of James Cavanaugh and Russ Morgan. Although it has been performed by innumerable artists, including Louis Armstrong and George Burns, the renditions by those quintessential crooners, Frank Sinatra in 1961 and Dean Martin in 1964, were by far the most successful. Contemporary singers, such as Michael Buble, keep the song ringing in the popular ear.
Lyricists may be more interested in the popular mood more than in philosophical rectitude. Thus, the notion that one can be a “nobody” might not occur to the likes of Cavanaugh and Morgan as being a metaphysical impossibility. Nor would they question why anyone would love a “nobody” or how a “nobody” could elicit love from a “somebody”. The lyrics minimize the reality of the person more than they maximize the importance of love. Yet, it may not be easy to resist the charm of Sinatra and Martin. While the unloved may feel like “nobodies,” they should be encouraged to abandon that self-deception.
Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II presented a contrasting view in their 1965 musical, “The Sound of Music”. Maria (Julie Andrews) confesses her love for the Captain (Christopher Plummer) in the song, “An Ordinary Couple”: “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could, so somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good. . . For here I am standing here loving you.” We can love because we have something within ourselves that enables us to love. We love another because we find something good or lovable in that other person. Love does not create the good in another person; it discovers it and responds affirmatively.
In Plato’s Euthyphro, Socrates asks whether the gods love something because it is good, or whether something is good because the gods love it. In other words, is love a response to a good that is already present in what is loved, or does love create a good that was originally a void? Socrates, being a realist, stands by the former while his counterpart, Euthyphro, opts for the latter. There is no singing in any of the Platonic Dialogues and Euthyphro does not have the advantage that Sinatra and Martin enjoy. Euthyphro’s sophistry has become incarnated in modern schmaltz. But it also survives in a sophistical attempt to rationalize abortion.
In 2005, the Los Angeles Times ran a story by Stephanie Simon with the curious title, “Offering Abortion, Rebirth”. Simon interviewed Dr. William F. Harrison, an abortion provider, and observed abortions that he performed at his clinic. Harrison died in 2010, shortly after closing down his clinic because of health reasons. As of 2005, Dr. Harrison had performed over 20,000 abortions. Concerning the objects of his abortions, he told his interviewer that “It’s not a baby to me until the mother tells me it’s a baby.”
Here is the same fallacy that Socrates sought to expose. Dr. Harrison accords the mother the power to determine whether her baby is a baby. The reality of the baby does not count. At the same time, he denies his own capacity to recognize the presence of a baby, while meekly acquiescing to the mother’s subjective determination. He is willing to grant the woman the power to determine whether what he going to abort is or is not a baby, a power that he believes is lacking in himself. The baby is not a baby but is suspended in a void awaiting the mother’s decision as to whether he is a baby or not. Moreover, it is the aborting woman who is being “reborn”!
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Such are the considerable semantic acrobatics that are a daily occurrence within the abortion industry. Abortionists are not killing babies, they are orchestrating the rebirth of women who undergo abortions. Abortion, therefore, is about “birth”. They are presumed to have power where power is impossible, and lack power when power is required. They somehow can read the future, although they remain blind to the present.
We are all “somebodies” from the outset. Love does not turn “nobodies” into “somebodies,” but rejoices in the somebody that we already are. By withholding love, we do not erase another’s reality, but fail to recognize what it justly deserves. Abortion is maintained because abortionists and their clients can step out of reality and believe that their dream of the future is more tangible than the weight of the present. Disciples of Socrates are urgently needed in the present world. Philosophy is not only a love of wisdom, but a love of reality. Let us not allow abortionists to abort philosophy.