My World View: Love
My thoughts on “love” — a philosophical and semantic essay.
A highly intelligent woman friend of mine in Germany once asked me what I thought love was
and here I try (in English) to recreate, and expand upon, what I tried to explain
to her (in German) back then.
- If it is a noun, the word “love” is an abstract noun [Note 1] — so much at least is a truism; it is a label attached by most people to any one of, and also to any combination of, a collection of emotions experienced by human beings and (arguably) by at least some animals [Note 2].
- If it is a verb, the word “love” means — very simply — to experience any one of, or any combination of, that same collection of emotions referred to in the definition of the abstract noun. As with the semantics of belief, the semantics of love are really very basic: living beings experience a wide range of what are called emotions; some of those emotions are described or identified as “love” and in many human languages a verb exists of which the meaning, albeit highly ambiguously, is (simply put) to experience any subset of that set of emotions.
- Of the emotions identified as being in the set referred to as love, some can be identified as some form of mental state resembling or involving euphoria associated with the object of the affection ("object" meaning the person or animal or thing loved), and some can be identified as less disturbing, as more nearly a feeling of inner warmth or contentment associated with that person (or animal or thing). These two sorts are very different, and the experience of the first can be very disturbing whereas the second is (generally) just reassuring. The combination of the two can clearly prove quite intoxicating [Note 3], whereas the first kind alone can evidently make the one experiencing it wish it would stop. [Note 6],
-
People often assume that everybody shares the same idea
of what is meant by the various labels (“anger”, “grief”,
“happiness”, and so on), and of what it is like to experience each of them.
However, I reckon that this assumption needs to be questioned.
I think there is a lot of evidence that what people mean by the words,
and what they experience in particular situations presumed likely to stir
particular emotions, may vary quite a lot; and I think many
psychologists, psychiarists, and psychoanalysts wold also take this view.
Emotions can often be described to others most clearly in terms of what the emotion makes the person (or animal) experiencing it want to do. This perspective is a very good way of talking about belief, and also, it turns out, for talking about love; but here there are two other ways as well. -
The different emotions collectively referred to as love
can be differentiated from each other
in three ways:
- by the type of person that most generally experiences each type of love
- by the type of person or animal or thing that is most generally the object of each type of love
- by the actions that each type of love generally tends to provoke in the person experiencing it [Note 4].
-
One kind of love is the love of a person for a thing — an object, or a commodity —
and this generally provokes excessive zeal at acquiring the commodity
or (in the case of a particular thing) in spending money on and time with the thing.
An example of such a commodity is money itself; hence the well known much quoted (and misquoted) verse (from 1 Timothy 6:10): ‘The love of money is the root of all evil” [Note 5].
An example of an object is a vintage motor car that needs a great deal of money and time spent on it to restore it to pristine condition and then to maintain, let alone run it. -
Another kind of love is the love of a young man for a pretty girl.
His emotions are often confused, but entail misery either
(if he has not yet told her how he feels) because of fears
that she will not like him or will think he is not good enough for her,
or else (if he has told her) when her response is to reject him.
Of course, the man who is not so young may well feel the same kind of love; but often, with an older man, previous experience will alter the whole experience somewhat.
Huge numbers of love songs, from pop ballads to operatic arias, have been written expressing the first big love experience of young men for the first girl they fall for in a big way. The topic is perhaps the most abiding cliché of all time.
One reason for this is that there is a tradition that a young man sings to his girl to try to woo her, and this is shown in art as far back as the mediaeval troubadours, through the lyric tenors of opera (say, Nemorino in Donizetti’s L'elisir d'amore) to the young male singers and boy bands of pop music. Indeed, it is evident as far back as the most ancient myths and legends: look at the story of Orpheus and Euridice.
The tendency of young men to sing is a stereotyped version of a general tendency among such men in love to want to use extravagent gestures to express their feelings to the girl in question. It is also a cliché that each young man imagines at the time that he is the first person in the history of the planet to have felt what he is going through. (Now, girls: when she falls in love, she thnks she’s the first girl etc. too; somehow, neither can imagine that their own parents probably went through exactly the same emotions at a similar age.)
Another fundamental tendency in young men is the sexual desire for the woman, which (until very recent years at any rate) was generally supposed to be far stronger than any desire by the typical young woman to reciprocate on that level. Traditional western society approved of this in both after marriage, but not before; the mismatch between the strength of this kind of desire respectively in men and women of the same age because of the differing profiles of this through the adult life cycle, plus the tradition of men being attracted to women quite a lot younger than themselves (rather than the other way round), led through the ages to disharmony. Nowadays an age gap in the other direction is also acceptable to some older women and some younger men; but this can tend to attract attention. - The love of a young woman for a handsome man might be supposed to be the same as that of a young man for a girl, but the vast amount of literary evidence suggests that the two are usually somewhat different, even at the beginning. It is quite possible that for some less innocent and more brazen young women the difference is smaller, at least for a certain phase in their development, but it would appear that even they generally tend back towards a female experience that is a little different from a man’s. Of course, some of our writers will ascribe an evolutionary reason for this; and they may well be correct. If they are, some feminists may be disappointed if they attempt to minimize this pattern of difference.
- The love of the older man for his wife, that is, after they have been married some time, is sometimes more of another kind of love, with perhaps some of the young man’s kind gradually fading and being replaced by the strong urge to provide for his wife, to have children with her, and to provide for those children.
- The love of a man for his children (in isolation from that for his wife) is different from that for his wife, or should be, in that (obviously) marital desire should not be in that mix. If danger threatens there will be a strong element of desire to protect them from harm and to give them the best of everything. However, not every father exhibits this equally strongly, and some may not show it much at all.
- The love of a woman for her children is a bit different from that of a man for his. In common is the desire to protect from danger, but the experience of childbirth appears in many cases to result in something even stronger and deeper in mothers than is generally seen in fathers.
- The love of brothers and sisters for each other is evidently extremely variable, but where present can be strong and is different again in nature, both in the emotions felt and in what actions it tends to provoke. Brothers may want to protect beloved sisters from harm just as fathers do children and husbands wives; sisters may want to protect brothers as mothers do children and wives do husbands. Away from threats of danger, however, the degree of drive to care for each other is evidently very different even from one pair of siblings to another in the same family: even among just three siblings A, B, and C, in the pairs A-B and A-C, A may feel quite different.
- The love between some elderly couples who have been together a long time is evidently different again from what it was even between the same couple in their youth and in their middle age. The feelings evolve as do the drives to action for each other, so the mix is not static across the years.
- The love of a child for each of his or her parents is another different set of emotions and desires to action. A child is often very powerfully driven to do, to achieve, something that will win the approval of each parent. This drive to achieve something begins very early, and is probably already there in toddlers; and for some perople it persists into adult life even to the death of the parent, especially if the longed-for approval is consistently denied by one parent. An adult will on the other hand often feel towards a frail elderly parent as a younger parent does toward a small child: they want to take care of them and protect them from harm, because of their greater vulnerability.
- There is often a quite different type of love again among good friends, and between comrades (including comrades in arms); and this does not refer (incidentally) to homosexual couples, but to what are simply close, devoted, platonic friendships. The emotions are typically just caring a lot about the other’s well-being and wanting to protect them from harm or hurt.
- What appears to confuse a lot of people not used to careful analytic thought and the examination of sometimes fine distinctions, particularly those not subtle in their understanding of semantics, is the simple fact that the same word "love" is used of all these kinds of relationship. Of course there are noun phrases such as "a mother’s love", "brotherly love" "courtly love", and others that purport to distinguish them; however although it should be obvious to everybody that these kinds of love are different, it is rather easy to forget how different because of the simple fact of the word "love" itself being there in the labels of all of them. It is all too easy to forget this when thinking about love.
- And most many people give quite a lot of thought to the subject of love at various times in their lives. From the teenage girl asking her mother how a person knows whether or not they are in love with somebody, to a son or daughter — perhaps in late middle age themselves already — agonizing over whether if they really love their aged, probably widowed, parent with encroaching senile dementia it is the right thing to do to find them a place in a care home, people agonize over what love is, whether they really love somebody at the moment, and (if so) how much, and in any case what to do about it.
Semantics
Recognition
What is the problem?
Notes
Note 1
Therefore from a scientific, empirical — if you like, ontological — point of view, there is no such thing as love. However, be careful: one of my long-standing friends (I have known him some 33 years), W.D.Zitzkat (nowadays a lawyer in Connecticut), wrote in an email to me some months back (in February 2009):Love is a drug, an hallucinogenic! It causes you to see things that aren't there, and be blind to things that are. It is midnight and afternoon at the same time. Love is what gives meaning to the universe.He went on to claim that perhaps I had never experienced it. The reason his argumentation is void is that everything he said in the abover quotation was metaphor. It was the stuff of poetry, if you like. His subsequent assertions were therefore as foolish as those of the people who still now (I write this in 2009) repeat the interview fragment in which Margaret Thatcher said: “There is no such thing as society”. The latter is always taken out of context. She had been asked whether she didn't think that “society” ought to pay for something, and the point she was making was that when people talk about “society” paying for something they were evading the reality by implying that there was some external source of money called “society” that was available to fund public expenditure whereas they were in reality saying that we, all of us, the taxpayers, should pay for it.
In the same way, here, attacking on one basis a remark made on another basis is pure sophistry. In my reply to my friend I asked:
Love is a drug, eh? OK. Where can I buy it? How much per ounce (28g.) is it on the street? Can I get it on prescription? What is the molecular structure? Has the FDA approved its possession & use in the USA? Or will I get arrested if caught with it by the police?In short, introducing metaphor into a philosophical or semantic discussion without saying so (that is, using it and then referring to the image in the metaphor as though it were literal and not metaphor) is stupid and makes the continuation of serious discussion impossible.