Gracchus

Love is a word used rather loosely by most. To some it means raging hormones. To some it is a warm fuzzy feeling.

Pure love, is not these things. We do not fall in love. We may with pain and effort ascend to it. Real love expects no return, and seldom gets any return but more pain. Love is one of the arts, and art is its own reward. By art you may add meaning to life. Without art, life is pointless.

The Dionysian

"To love those who do not love you is foolishness"

Tell that to all the people suffering from unrequited love. It may not make much sense to love someone who doesn't feel the same way but it's pretty f***ing hard to just stop loving them.

dostf

To love those who do not love you is foolishness"

Tell that to all the people suffering from unrequited love. It may not make much sense to love someone who doesn't feel the same way but it's pretty f***ing hard to just stop loving them.
(the dionysian)

- I agree, but the statement still holds true in the end.

Be seeing you...

Philosoft

Get used to it.

<strong> It means many other things, as well.

<strong>

Practice humility. There are as many concepts of "love" as there are "God." This is so because we have no thing - love or God - to compare our concepts. We learn the word, various people try to explain what 'feelings' the word represents, and then we arbitrarily apply the word to a set of emotions we believe is equivalent to what we have been told. This hardly makes for objectivity. You would do better to phrase this as an opinion.

The Dionysian

"I agree, but the statement still holds true in the end."

See, I can't really agree with you that it's foolish. To say it's foolish for someone to do something they have to have some choice in the matter. Do you really choose who you love? I think love just happens(i.e. we don't choose who we love).

dostf

See, I can't really agree with you that it's foolish. To say it's foolish for someone to do something they have to have some choice in the matter. Do you really choose who you love? I think love just happens(i.e. we don't choose who we love). (The Dionysian)

- Maybe Productive is a better decription or reasonable?? Although I would agree reason is oft times left far behind in these matters!!
- I guess i always view things from the "truth" perspective as opposed to biological perspective. Not that I don't hear what your saying.....

Be seeing you...

Oxymoron

Do you mean "do you really choose who you are sexually attracted to?". (To some extent we do, but the mechanisms are complex).

In terms of "love", replace "a partner whom I find sexually atteractive, with whom I share some common values and life goals with", then ask "do you really choose a partner who you find sexually attractive and with whom you share some common values and life goals with?" and I wonder how the answer can be anything but 'yes'.

The trivialisation (nay the Hollywoodisation) of 'love' (as in relationship love) seems to have fogged people's judgements. Love is not mysterious, love does not conquer all, love is not a drug though lust may be, love is not like oxygen at all, yada yada yada.

And if someone here believes 'God is love' would they kindly have the decency to tell us exactly what they mean by that statement, bearing in mind this is a philosophy forum, not a Mariah Carey lyric writing competition.

Beoran

Love between siblings, and between parents and their offspring is natural, for it benefits to life greatly fo siblings and offspring to be protected.

On the other hand, love between sexual partners was originally one of the greatest inventions of human kind ever. Hoswever, now, I fear this great invention may yet be corrupted. It is true, love does not save us, for it is something that needs to be saved itself. We must every time reinvent and recreate true love in a relationship. Lest it be forgotten, or trivialised, or corrupted. For if we do not recreate and renvent true love time and again, then soon it ll be come the depraved travesty that Holliwood and others have made of it.

Keith Russell

Greetings:

Love is far more than sexual attraction, and one is absolutely able to choose who one loves, and whether one will continue to love that person, or someone else.

Love doesn't 'just happen' with nothing else ever changing, once it does. Love is an ongoing process; it changes, it grows, and it weakens--and these changes happen in response to both one's own actions, and the actions of one's partner.

Throughout every day I see attractive women, and sometimes they are attracted to me, too. I have the freedom to choose whether to act on these flirtations, or not. My choice not to act is guided by the knowledge that otherwise I would jeopardize--if not utterly destroy--the relationship I have with my wife.

It is that which I value most, but I have to choose to remember that; even that realization is not automatic.

Love absolutely is a choice; consciously chosen, and consciously maintained.

Keith.

philechat

Could I describe the experience of "love" in a way we attempt to explain the perception of "color"? Perhaps by the phenomelogical method we avoid the problem of measuring, say, "love" in the physical world, other than a mental construct based partially on previous experience and partially on the workings of brain perception.

The physical world is, strictly speaking, without color. The theory is demonstrated by the experiment with "metamers"--different combination of light wavelength resulting in the same color perception, because of the same amount of stimulation on the different cones despite the different physical properties of the source. "Love" is similarly a perception that bears no direct relationship with the physical world.

To examine this view, we may also be reminded that color perception is often constant under different conditions of light. We consider a book to be "white" in dim lamplight and in noonday sunlight alike, even if the illumination differs by 1000x. Analogously we consider an extremely wide range of perceptual and thought affects (sometimes vastly different from physical "realities") as "love".

By properly sorting "love" in the world of phenomena like "color", we avoided the unnecessarily "mystical" interpretive trap which many theists might lurk us into. (Similar argument may be made of "religious experience", perhaps another term of perception which need not be the property of the sense-object [god] but as a construct of human mind)

[ December 16, 2002: Message edited by: philechat ]</p>