I would like to ask, but what is the ends of love? Aristotle mentions that the best love is the moral love, the love of what is good, and self-love that orients ourselves for us is good.
Socrates instructs us towards the transcendental, towards truth, beauty, and goodness. This is a tad ironic though because then he states that he doesn’t know what these are that that all he knows is that he knows nothing except that very fact.
Love comes to use in passion, gratitude. Should that not be it’s own sake?
I find love to be a scary thing because the things that you can naturally love towards you can naturally hate towards. It seems to be a very fine line between what we imagine as love and what we imagine as hate because we have such visceral reactions.
It is because of the love of God that we have a hate of hell, for example, since those ideas appear opposed and give us a natural gradient.
But maybe there is more metaphysics to the story.
I find Socrates argument very fascinating since it is a ladder of sorts that leads to beauty. In a sense love is moral, hence Aristotle’s argument.
I find that love is something I cannot grasp hence I am asking what it is. I am open to all sorts of arguments and poetic statements.
As a product of modernity, I don’t believe in truth, goodness, or beauty as anything more than contingent values that people arrive at differently. They are important but in vastly different ways for everyone. If there is something more substantial behind them, I doubt anyone has clear access to it.
Love is for experiencing, not theorising about. The only thing I feel I’ve learned in close to six decades is that, if there is such a thing as tragedy, it is probably the person who is unable to give or receive love. Which probably means I have some nineteenth-century romanticism bobbing up and down in my ocean of uncertainty.
I should mention but there is some substantial theorizing about it. There is Schopenhauer and Nietzsche with regards to their idea of drive. In particular, Schopenhauer describes it as a will to reproduce that drives us to love.
I appreciate your sentiments though. I try to conceptualize love in more fleeting terms as well. Something transcendental, yet immanent. Yet. I have a drive to intellectualize.
There are so many rituals as well. From Ancient Greece to mystical rituals of Orthodox Christianity to modern date nights there are so many varieties of love.
I am really trying to make sure I have a proper definition of love, really. I want to make sure if I love, it is a love I am comfortable with. I like the idea of love. It is a touching sentiment and I would like to hear what people have to say.
I really feel it is important as I believe, when I can, in the categorical imperative. So I try to be consistent with what I say. An ideal of consistency, since it cannot exist in practice unfortunately. But we always posit certainty (see Wittgenstein).
I think most us are probably aware of the billions of words devoted to love, from philosophy to novels and self-help. I wouldn’t be much interested in anything Schopenhauer or Nietzsche have to say about it, given their limitations in this area.
I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t go to philosophy to explore love either. Just do it!
I think @Tom_Storm’s response is actually a good illustration of why the question really is worth asking after all. The claim that love is “for experiencing, not theorising about” is itself a theoretical claim about love — specifically, that love is a kind of raw experience that gets distorted or diminished by philosophical reflection.
But is that true?
It seems to me that the people who love well — who sustain relationships, who orient their lives around something genuinely good — are precisely the people who have reflected on what they’re doing and why. Unreflective love is just as likely to be obsession, projection, or sentimentality as it is to be the real thing.
To your actual question Bizet: I think the Socratic ladder image is more or less right, but the key insight is that love isn’t one thing among others that you then try to understand. It’s closer to the condition that makes understanding possible at all. You can’t inquire seriously into anything unless you care about getting it right — and that caring is already a form of love (of truth, of the good, of the real).
So love isn’t opposed to theorizing; its what gives theorizing its point. In my humble opinion, the person who says “stop analysing and just experience it” has it exactly backwards. The deepest experiences are the ones you can bring into reflective clarity without them evaporating.
That said, the Socratic point about not-knowing is important too. Love exceeds any particular formulation you give of it — but that’s not because its irrational or unconceptualizable. Its because the reality you’re trying to understand is richer then any single act of understanding can capture. Which is exactly why you must keep asking, reflecting and inquiring in pursuit of it.
But that’s not quite what I’m saying. I don’t think of love as a raw experience that becomes distorted by theory. I’m not sure how you would see such a “distortion” taking place. My point is that, for me personally, love is for doing, not talking about. I try to avoid theorising, whether it’s love, the self, morality, or purpose. That is simply my response to questions like this. Others can theorise until the cows come home about all manner of things, and the theories are sometimes interesting.
I’m the science types and so I view love as emotional gravity, an attractive force that can hold many independent lovable entities together in various conformations. Each such conformation is dynamic and fully determined by relevant love-factors at play.
In this view you can have stars, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, rogue planets, and black holes and every conceivable lovable.
Now enrich the system with a repulsive force, hate (?) and emerges a complex system of lovables, and now hateables, in intricate, exquisite conformations that morph continuously in real-time.
Empedocles and his binary system of philotes (love) vs. neikos (strife).
Apologies for theorizing, but AFAIK experimental physicists have no clue what to do with their time unless theoretical physicists tell them what to do with their time.
