What is love? Is it possible to give a formal definition?

General Philosophy
21

Brevity or conciseness/compactness (or “compactitude”, new word I just invented) is not inherently “low effort” in so much as it is efficient.

The OP invokes classic belief from human civilization and fleshes it out further with commonly held and known philosophical disciplines or opinions (the classic “3 types of love”).

It’s reasonable. I do note however, there is a similar topic already in existence here. I am unsure if the OP was aware or not. Perhaps it might be merged? Oh, who could say. There’s only so many things to talk about, really. :slightly_smiling_face:

22

Now I finally understand your interpretation. So, it turns out that males, in principle, do not possess (and cannot possess) such a feeling as “love,” according to your logic?

23

Even reducing the scope to “the basic, functional reality your mother explained to you when you were two years old,” the definition I posted still applies.

No one can coerce another person into loving them back. The relationship must be reciprocal—each person must freely pursue it—or it is just one person coercing the other and erasing their freedom to choose (monism).

Likewise, someone cannot truly love another without caring for them, meaning they maintain an ongoing relationship without abandoning the other person or isolating themselves (pluralism).

So to love someone is to enable the relationship and sustain it indefinitely—or it ceases to be love.

24

Thanks for the tip. I honestly didn’t know about this topic, although I think I even looked into it… In any case, my idea was to explore this issue in the context of Christian thought.

I didn’t think the topic would devolve into cosmic exploration or a debate about whether the topic should exist.

My question is very, very narrow and wasn’t intended as a search for deep meaning:

Me: God is love!
Child: Dad, tell me what love is so I can understand whether it’s God or not.

Just a simple conversation with a child. But if all this seems repetitive or uninteresting, delete it or whatever… In any case, this topic is for the “inner courtyard.”

25

If I may clarify:

Is the “other” and our ontological need for it at the center of your approach, or is it the “I” and my perception of it?

26

Of course.

You may or may not find my posts on the earlier topic, specifically here and here of some relevance.

Essentially challenging the person to determine what love is not, thus isolating the universal qualities of such. Without getting into much detail, basic “requirements” such as obviously “awareness” or a person or thing’s existence, and the desire to have it not be taken away, harmed, or destroyed. This seems like a reasonable foundation. But such foundations are shared by things that mimic, or at least have shared qualities of, love. Things like respect or admiration. You can respect or admire something without loving it. Or can you? This is where the waters become muddied, if not by our own minds and will. :slightly_smiling_face:

27

I didn’t wrote males but mammals! Females are more on the egg management side but this permeate all the mammals mind males included.

To touch what I’m talking about look on YT at other intelligent species like crows, parrots, even octopus, playing with humans: you have the playful smart behaviour without the “sticky warmness” of mammals. Much more clean.

28

Essentially, you’re proposing something like an “apophatic approach.” It’s easier to define what a concept isn’t, because any attempt to define what it is will narrow, simplify, collapse, or appropriate its content.

But. I once heard a woman say, “If he beats you, it means he loves you.” She was talking about her husband’s domestic violence. Incidentally, she didn’t come up with this; it’s a whole tradition of interpreting male aggression in the family (in some countries). This explanation seems completely at odds with everything we know, but it exists!

Going further, I’d take a broader view and say that “love” is everything that the subject (the subject is important) calls love, as opposed to everything else.

I don’t know if you agree with this?

I’ll add:

Love means experiencing feelings
and interpreting them as love. But does that make it love?

29

Since we were talking about an egg, I must have subconsciously added this—after all, it’s the female who carries the egg.

But, wait a minute, how should caring for the egg concern the male, according to your approach? Or am I missing something?

30

that’s the reason I used this specific “permeate” verb. Love i.e. caring the defective egg concern the male at 100%: he has to care for the loved family.

31

Honestly, if you look at it cynically, if it weren’t for my mother, who told me about love at age two, I wouldn’t have cared at all about any eggs that someone else was carrying. That is, if I hadn’t been pre-installed with this software, where my “should” was deduced by default from what my mother said, I doubt I would have become anything more than a “carrier of seed for genetic diversity.” In this regard, I find your statement about “should” to be a construct.

32

The center is the genuine “other”.

In order for love to fulfil its ontological nature as Relational Enablement (non-insistent/caring), it must enable and sustain the other as a genuinely independent, free being—one who is free to pursue the relationship or not, without coercion or abandonment.

If the “I” and my own perception were the centre, love would reduce to either coercing the other into erasure (no genuine distinction—monism) or abandoning the other into isolation (no genuine relationship—pluralism). Neither works.

Judging from what you clarified in post 24 about wanting a simple explanation (like explaining “God is love” to a child), you might actually find the full paper useful—it develops this relational approach in much more depth.

Here it is if you’re interested: The Relational Precondition of Intelligibility and the Resolution of the One-Many Problem

Would that clarify it?

33

It’s a means to an end. It works for some people. Others it doesn’t. We discard the wrapper of a straw that protects it from contaminants after it serves its purpose. What matters is the straw, which in this case is the truth, or perhaps, like most things, the “most-relevant answer.”

Women, and men as well, say crazy things all the time. Many of which they will live and die believing. Some will argue (quite effectively) that man is a being that is not happy unless something or someone is in servitude or submission to him. I would argue this is the lack of refinement that is present in a child or wild animal. We like to take out our anger and frustration, often self-imposed and the result of (sometimes) easily-avoidable life choices on something. And this something, unfortunately, is often on something weaker that we know cannot kill us if we do. Not unlike how the mentally unwell and decrepit (“bullies”, in Western culture) pick on smaller people, infrequently those who are their own size, and almost never those larger than themselves. For if they did, they would likely not be around for very long.

We’re getting into the territory of psychology at this point so to circle back and be generous with seeing another perspective: People say there is a thin line between love and hate. You don’t care if an unattractive person who you hold no regard for sleeps with another man or even perishes. Other than basic existential concern for the concept of life itself. Now do you?

No one needs to know everything.

1 Like
34

Give me some time to translate, read, and think about it. It looks promising.

1 Like
35

Looks like love comes in many forms:
Love of x, where x \in \{\text{family, mate, friend, subject, activity, ...}\}.

Love of a mate is what seems to appeal to people, young and old. The yin-yang craze is universal: every culture has its own Romeo and Juliet story and modern media seems unflyable unless there’s romance in them.

The Arabic tale of Layla and Majnun describes divanagi (love madness), understood perhaps as the apotheosis of love for one’s mate.

Kauaʻi ʻōʻō

36

This might be a bit off-topic, but I’ll say it anyway. Often, when we reflect on the fate of the oppressors, we forget about the oppressed.

This is a rather subtle topic, and I’m afraid I might write something here that will seem hyper-strange. However, I increasingly notice that the possibility of oppression lies not in the oppressor, but also in the oppressed themselves. We’re accustomed to thinking of oppression as an active act of the oppressor, completely excluding the role of the oppressed. But it does exist. Moreover, often the victim is the source of oppression. The victim seems to cry out: oppress me, become my master. I don’t know the nature of this phenomenon: perhaps it’s a desire to obtain benefits with the least amount of willpower. However, such behavior is observed in animals (for example, Didier Desor’s rat experiment). I think there are people in each of our lives who have chosen this method of adapting to the world, who declare: “I live by the principle of never kick a man when he’s down.” Perhaps in some societies this is more common than in others. Therefore, being beaten can very well be interpreted as a blessing to the master to whom you’ve surrendered your will, so that he may rule.

37

Love is choosing to see someone as irreducibly themselves — not who you need them to be. Not a version of them you can fully grasp or explain. That seeing is never safe. It asks something of you. And it’s never guaranteed to last or be returned.

38

If I see a person who doesn’t know what a sinkhole is approaching a sinkhole, do I let them be their “irreducible self” and perish or do I turn them into the person they them self would want to be if they knew what they currently do not?

39

Love is a happy coupling relationship between two or more individuals - taking the Eudaimonia of the other as a component of one’s own Eudaimonia (the first principle), with non-infringement as the bottom line and actively defending the core Eudaimonia of the other party (the second principle), and jointly designing, maintaining and iterating each other’s Eudaimonia environment as the practical path (the third principle).

This is the definition of love given by “Ethics of Eudaimonia”

Within the framework of the Ethics of Eudaimonia, love is not a mysterious emotion or a priori obligation, but rather a pattern of interpersonal interaction that can be structured and understood through a three-layer principle.

The dimension of the first principle: Love as empathy and promotion of Eudaimonia

The starting point of love lies in incorporating the other person’s Eudaimonia into one’s own Eudaimonia function. When one person loves another, the satisfaction of the other’s needs (survival, expression, curiosity, pride) directly becomes the source of one’s own Eudaimonia - the other’s joy is one’s own joy, and the other’s pain is one’s own pain. This deep coupling of Eudaimonia makes “promoting the other’s Eudaimonia” a self-driven behavior.

The second principle’s dimension: Love as the bottom-line guarantee of non-infringement

Love is not unconditional sacrifice, but rather the absolute defense of the other’s core Eudaimonia. In a loving relationship, the second principle (not infringing upon others’ Eudaimonia) is strengthened into an active defense mechanism: love means never actively harming the other and being the most resolute protector when the other is under external threat. This sets a clear ethical boundary for love - any manipulation, belittlement or deprivation carried out in the name of love has already betrayed the essence of love.

The third principle’s dimension: Love as the co-construction of a common environment of Eudaimonia

The highest form of love is not possession but the joint creation of an environment where both can thrive. This means: (1) respecting each other’s right to pursue Eudaimonia independently and not imposing one’s own model of Eudaimonia on the other; (2) seeking consensus through negotiation rather than coercion during conflicts; (3) jointly addressing external challenges to make the environment for each other’s Eudaimonia more resilient. Love thus becomes the “co-creation of a happy environment” at the smallest unit - a cooperative system jointly designed, maintained, and iterated by two (or more) people.

Pathological Diagnosis of Love

Eudaimonia Ethics also provides tools for identifying “false love”:

When one party deprives the other of their right to make autonomous choices in the name of “having their best interests at heart”, this violates the first principle (respecting the other party’s right to define their own Eudaimonia) and the second principle (not infringing upon others).

When love is entirely based on negative pride (zero-sum comparison, possession and control), it has degenerated into a power relationship rather than true love.

When there is no shared space for the third principle in a loving relationship (where one party sets all the rules and the other can only obey), this is closer to a master-slave relationship than a loving one.

Summary of Definitions

Based on the three-tier principle, the definition of love in the Ethics of Eudaimonia is:

Love is a happy coupling relationship between two or more individuals - taking the Eudaimonia of the other as a component of one’s own Eudaimonia (the first principle), with non-infringement as the bottom line and actively defending the core Eudaimonia of the other party (the second principle), and jointly designing, maintaining and iterating each other’s Eudaimonia environment as the practical path (the third principle).

This definition liberates love from the enigmatic fog of romanticism, transforming it into an understandable, assessable, and optimizable ethical relationship framework. It acknowledges the emotional essence of love while endowing it with a clear normative structure - love thus ceases to be an “indescribable” entity and becomes a project of Eudaimonia that can guide practice, diagnose pathology, and promote growth.

40

Warning them isn’t overriding their irreducible self. It’s honoring it.
Their irreducible self includes what they’d want if they knew what you know.
You’re not turning them into someone else. You’re giving them back to themselves.