Friend

My question pertains to the transformation of love and the different understandings of love. Plato viewed love as Eros and experienced through philosphy and love of boys. Love was also a transcendent reality. Aristotle also viewed love as transcendent, but only through friendship, especially philosphers because they sought after truth. Lucrecious (I think this interpretation is correct) viewed love as a reproductive drive that causes one to "fall in love" and to engage in marriage. The male venus urges a man to put his seed in a woman. Jumping to the New Testament, love is viewed in the form of agape, self-giving love. Love in the old testament was interpreted in the idea of relationships with friends and marriage.

Is there a main philosophy surrounding how love is to be defined? Is love any different today as it is compared to some past philosophy? Or is it that the objects of love has changed? Is there any transcendent aspect to love or is it a physical, human thing? Is the sex drive a corruption of the urge to reproduce or is it an expansion or bettering of it?

Thank you

~ Friend ~

Psychic

According to my view of love, i am wondering why Love is discussed in this forum?!! I think it would be more appropriately dealt with in the E/C forum!

well my friend I am not sure of your basic belief since you haven't specified it, but I would like to assume that you being here I might conclude that you do take evolution as a fact.

I have many interest in evolutionary psychology, and in this realm love can be defined (that's me making this here!) as one of the important functions of the brain to emotionally distort a human's view of others, to serve many functions as reproduction, preservation of the copies of that individual's gene, starting pacts of reciprocal altruism...etc

let make take for example our love for our siblings, any of your siblings share with you half of your genes, so a gene that controls your primitive emotions and formulate those emotion in a way to endorse you siblings with love, would certainly flourish in the genetic pool. being always in equilibruim with the genes that sets you in competions for parental resources with your siblings. that explains the Love-hate relationship between siblings we all know about.

Sometimes it's a traumatic experience to view all those emotions of love you have towards you friends for example as being an evolutionary tool to create a stronger tribe! or supreme emotions and pure love you carry for your spouse as being another tool to guarentee survival. but that's how your brain works. self-deception about these fundemental facts is also an evolutionary design to keep these emotions real.

i don't know if I am adressing your point here, I am a bit new to philosophy forum. but I'll try to be of a use while around.

the_cave

Why is any of this emotional distortion?

Actually, I don't hate any of my siblings, and never have. (I admit I am an eldest child.)

And why is this self-deception? It could certainly be unproblematic for these emotions to have their origins in genetic survival, yet be adapted by modern humans in an affective manner. I don't find that traumatic at all. Just because they were once tools for survival doesn't mean that's all they are now.

John Page

The experience/idea of love is that for which you will give or commit your own life above all other things. Love is the source of altruistic behavior except when it is love of self.

Marlowe

Wow. Do you honestly have such a mechanistic view of your own emotions? Have you ever been in the heights of love, looked at your lover and said "My dear, I am engaged in great self-deception right now to preserve my genes. I must have you!"




Friend - all of your definitions of love are pretty ancient - nothing later than the New Testament. Our modern idea of Romantic Love originated in the High Middle Ages, between 1150 and 1250. Here the idea of love as an intensely personal, individual relationship between two people first emerged. During this time there were only two ideas of love - eros, or lust; and agape. Both were impersonal. Eros was the zeal of the body, and was physical, having nothing to do with who the person was. Agape required that you love everyone, again, no stamp of the individual at all.

During this time, people were married by familial arrangements. Again the individual and what they want is not considered. This partnership was then made 'sacred' by being sanctified by a priest, even though it was in reality a financial arrangement. If you fell in love it was not with your spouse, so love was by definition adulterous, making love a terrifying destiny because the social response was - death.

However, a whole class of literature springs up, the Arthurian Romances, praising the heroic heart that will love by individual passion even though it means facing death, and worse. In Chretian de Troyas' Tristan and Isolde, Tristan is told he has drunk his death when he falls in love with Isolde who is promised to his uncle, King Mark. He responds, "I don't know what you mean. If you mean the pain of my love for Isolde - that is my life. If you mean the death I can expect, I accept that. If you mean eternal damnation in the fires of Hell, I accept that, for I will still have the memory of my love - and it will not be Hell."

Keep in mind that in 1200 the belief in Hell was complete and real, so this was no pretty, empty statement. The Romances have been interpreted as the individual will asserting itself against the spiritual tyranny of the Catholic Church, which had a chokehold on the minds and spirits of the people. Eventually the Romances produce another new idea, in Wolfram von Escenbach's Parzival, the hero refuses a woman who is given to him in the traditional medieval way, and earns his own wife. This represents a reconciliation of the idea of love with marriage - an idea that stays with us to this day. Essentially, in this interpretation of love, every act of love is a heroic journey, a quest of the individual heart - and anyone who's worked on a real relationship knows how much stamina, selflessness, and dedication to yourself and your own true desires it really takes.

matthias j.

Friend, I recommend reading "Consuming Desire" by Lawrence Birkin, I personally think it's a marvellous book and his theory is quite acceptable.

I'd also recommend authors as Wilhelm Reich, Alfred Kinse, George Bataille and Von Krafft-Ebing. I haven't read them but they were recommended to me by my professor Sexual Ethics.

Psychic

actually I made a note in this passage that it’s me speaking, and the ideas in that paragraph represents my own view of the subject.
Suppose that you are asked to give an opinion on a colleague of yours. Let’s suppose that you love your colleague and you start talking, we can all imagine what kind of description you will give, your emotions in this case made you only consider everything positive of your colleague. Now lets consider the opposite, a description of a colleague you hate … etc etc.
What do you think is the true description of your friend? That’s why emotions are distortion to your view of the world. (that’s what I think).

I was talking about the scientific explanation of the phenomenon of Love-hate relationship between siblings and you are asking me to prove the phenomenon!!!

If you don’t find it traumatic, it actually was traumatic to me!
And the self-deception is to keep the emotions real, and has nothing to do with prevention of the trauma I am talking about.

Psychic

Argument out of personal Incredulity.

all of your definitions of love are pretty ancient.



I really wonder what is the source of all this?! I think to claim that the romantic love emerged in 1250 I guess you have to prove that there wasn’t any romantic love on the globe before that particular date.
I wonder how can an inherent basic emotion so incorporated into the mind of the homo sapiens be emergent in 1250!
Inherent basic emotions. That statement can be deduced from countless facts including:
the universal reactions humans have to romantic love, and the unified themes of the stories of love around the word.
The monogamous tribes of Africa and many hunter-gatherer societies around the globe.
The presence of the basic emotions in the very young, who are not still exposed to influence of adults.
No need to elaborate too much here, I would recommend that you start your journey here

Marlowe

?? I'm not arguing - out of incredulity or anything else. I was making a joke. You know - humor? It was not intended to be at anyone's expense.

I never said it wasn't.

It is an idea elaborated by comparative mythology scholar Joseph Campbell - see his "Transformations of Myth Through Time, Volume III, The Western Way".

I thought according to you all love was self-deception so how can you now claim it is a basic emotion incorporated into the mind of homo sapiens?

Please cite one of these stories so we can see what idea of romantic love you are talking about and compare it to the one I described and then maybe we can get past this semantic argument.

Monogamy does not equal love - that is not the kind of individualized passion for another that emerges out of the Arhturian Romances and that exists in the West as the ideal of romantic love today. If you would like to cite a tale from these tribes of Africa or hunter/gatherer societies that demonstrate that they came up with the idea of personalized individual passion before 1250 I will gladly cede the point.

I don't follow what this has to do with your arguments with my discussion. Please explain.

Thank you for the helpful link, but as I have a BS in Biology and Genetics and have read entire textbooks on sex and natural selection, I think I'm covered.

JP2

Love is given unwarranted credence by the fact that differing emotional responses - or, at least, similar emotional responses brought about by differing stimuli - are all just lumped under the same term, "love", in the English language. Love can be seen as almost transcendent and metaphysical in its scope in the English languages as a result of the fact that differing emotions (the love for one's spouse, the love for one's family, the love for humanity etc.) are all defined under the same word. Christians, of course, are quick to jump on this transcendant scope of what we know to be love - the fact that all these differing "types" of love are unified under the same expression gives the false impression that they are unified under a distinctly grander concept, namely God. If you ever get drawn into a conversation about love with a Christian, then it would be futile to convince them that the "Christian" concept of transcendant love is dependant and indeed subsequent to the semantic unification of several differing concepts under the same term.

Where was I?

Ah yes. When questioning the nature of love, we would be best served to divide it up into differing concepts. For a start, I think we can follow the Greeks when we say we can divide love up into:

Philia: Brotherly Love (The love shared between friends)
Eros: Romantic love (The love shared between - well - lovers)
Agape: Moral, impersonal love (Usually associated with God, but I think - as atheists/agnostics - we can define this as the impersonal love for humanity in general)
Storge: Parental Love (the instinctive bond between parent and offspring, or - more broadly - for family)

I realise the last entry isn't usually included with the former three in describing Greek concepts of love, but it's a Greek word and sufficiently different from the other three to warrant it's own place.

Anyway, regardless of how many times you divide the concept of love here (I've only provided four general examples of love here, but the divisions are potentially infinite) it must be understood that there are different types of love, and that each of these can be explained - to differing degree of success - in isolation. For instance, I believe that Eros and Storge can be sufficiently explained biologically, that philia can be explained in terms of the co-dependant, mutually advantageous nature of "society" (primitive or otherwise) and that agape is merely the global extension of philia. If there is something that binds these kinds of "love" - or something leads us to call them all by the same name in the English language - it is the fact that they represent differing forms of moral "duty" or "responsibility". It is this recognition of an almost Kantian imperitive - whether such an imperitive can be demonstrated to exist or not - that causes us to murkily merge them unde the same term. If we all spoke Sanskrit - which if the page I just read is correct, has 86 terms for what we would otherwise call "love" - I suspect that the issues you've raised, Friend, would be rendered mute.

Therefore, the moral of the story is thus:

If in doubt, retreat to semantical deconstructionalism.