Are you the same person you were when you were six years old? When did you become an “irreducible” person, in your eyes? Might others become such at a younger or even older age? No, logic would dictate with experience we grow and gain new knowledge and understanding, therefore, by all reasonable standards of personhood and identity, we, effectively become different persons through time. That is to say, our future self may very well laugh or have revulsion at our current or former self. Life is dynamic. It is not “unchangeable” or in this case, “irreducible.” It fluctuates. It can grow and yes it can deplete.
Well how convenient. Even a soothsayer or psychic has not this trait. Why even question anything at that point. At this point, there is no such thing as a “reducible” self if literally every possibility is already included or otherwise contained by your choice of words. This is what is known as a false dichotomy..
Again, more pseudo-intellectual backtracking. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you’re not simply “moving the goalposts” but are instead probing into something deeper most discount. Sure. Let’s pursue that for a moment. No one said anyone was becoming “someone else” simply what all outside non-biased observers would consider (and the person themselves as well) as a “distinct identity.” I don’t quite understand the framing of the response you’ve given. It seems to assume all influence or action on a person with emotion, genuine or with true concern or not, will result in a restoration of “one’s self.” That’s simply not true.
Love is truth in action. Truth is what was, what is and what ought to be. Love is about the what ought to be aspect of truth. What ought to be is explained in the following.
Since you mentioned the NT, for Jesus God is truth, e.g., Spirit of Truth. Jesus set the standard for love as keepng His commandments. His commandments are truth. His commandments distill down to “Love your neighbor as yourself” and the Golden Rule which amount to the same thing.
So love is treating others according to the ought to be aspect of truth: love is truth in action.
Who’s to say “what was” if one’s never been there? Who’s to say “what is” if one only knows what he can see, comprehend, or is otherwise made aware of? And most pertinently, who’s to say what “ought” to be? You? Who are you but one embodiment of flesh among 8 billion others who perhaps deludes himself into thinking he is anything but? It would only reasonably follow that, your idea of “love” is but “desire” or in laymen’s terms “whatever I feel is best at any given moment.” Is this really any progress from the social structure of animals millions of years behind us?
It makes sense any religion that has lasted through primeval times (yes that term is likely intentional) to this day fundamentally does little more than perpetuate and attempt to validate what is basically the same animal-like drumbeat of “do what you want.” For any who would suggest otherwise would likely have been killed. What a tragedy. Thankfully, some of us ascend. To places beyond the average man’s comprehension.
Thanks: this is exactly what I labeled as “permeating” (see also the typical replies like “Love is Truth,” etc.).
The “defective egg” management polarization of the mammalian mind is so deeply ingrained that it permeates absolutely everything, especially broad abstractions like “God”, “Truth”, etc.
When animals get eyes, their presence to the world is seeing. When they get ears, it is hearing. When they get the biological burden of caring for a defective egg, it becomes universal caring: Love.
This is why my definition of Love is both the flattest and the deepest.
But in performance terms mammals out performed dinosaurs. They survived the mass extinction event and will probably develop a strategy to survive a similar event.
No. A meteorite wiping the most advanced terrestrial animals and putting instead defective animals is not a good thing. As I explained the root cause is our dirty unfinished solar system. edit: we are expression of dirtiness. Pass your hand on your scrocht and smell. This is the specific animal Being of mammals.
I like to approach this in a more dynamic way. What is happening when “loving” is happening?
Some observations:
Love seems boundless in all directions. I love my wife above anyone else. We get married and have a child. Now I love my wife more, and now I love my child as well, in a different way, but yet, now loving both of them above anyone else. No need to prioritize love between them seems to have arisen at all. We have a second child. Must I apportion some of my love for the first child to the second now? Must I stop loving my wife as much so I have resources and an open space to love my children? No, I can continue growing the love of my wife and first child, and now love my second child as much as them both. And as my infant grows and develops his unique personality, my love for him in particular grows and changes, without affecting my growing love for my wife and first child, or the growing love for our family together. And now I might love my community and my world more, where my family lives and makes each other happy (occasionally). How is this physically possible? How is it that love can be seemingly boundless, both in capacity to love individuals more, and breadth to love more people? What substance behaves like that? How can this be understood logically?
Love requires two, united. For loving to be happening, there must exist the lover and the beloved. Love, now a third thing happening between them, joins them, bonds them, in a relationship we can call loving.
Love, as a metaphysical substance/concept/thing, is the union of two separate relata by relationship. The new thing unified as love (like a married couple), is held in this relation by the love each member exchanges with each other. Love begets love again, without diminishing anything. “Each other” becomes “us alone”; two become one flesh. This aspect of love is reflected in the fact that when my wife is sick or in the hospital, I am more distressed than when I am sick - because the union of love. It distresses me more when she is hurt than when I am hurt, to the point that, given a choice for my body to suffer or hers, I would choose mine to reduce the overall suffering to our union, and simply for her sake. (She would do the same, so love puts the beloved in a pickle sometimes. In such a moment, where two lovers are fighting over which one will go before the firing squad for the other’s sake, they may be filled with joy over sharing such a passionate, sacrificial love, as they are filled with sorrow over knowing the other’s plight and the plight to their union.)
Love simultaneously seeks to consume the beloved entirely, while saving and beholding and protecting the beloved entirely. So we hold the beloved at a safe distance, protecting them in themselves, as not to impede the beloved in any way from being exactly who they are in themselves, because them being exactly who they are is only who is loved; and at the same time, we seek to engulf them, embrace them, and bring them intimately as close to oneself as possible. Mature “eros” is a great metaphor for this aspect of love. To consume without destroying; to ravage while being ravaged. The burning bush is a good metaphor - fire (which consumes by nature) that does not consume. Holy communion is the best metaphor - eat my very flesh (which would seem to destroy a life) but for the sake of joining you to my eternal life. Another metaphor for this beholding/consuming interplay, is the kiss - we literally seek to consume the other because we love the sight of them just they are, we seek to draw them inside ourselves, to share a most intimate closeness. Another similar metaphor is when we look at a baby, and just want to “gobble them up”. That itself isn’t love, but a physical image and experience that is like love.
Love is creative, pro-generative, procreative, multiplying. This is why above I just said “eros” is a metaphor for love, but eros is not actual love. Eros can be reduced to desire in the act of being satiated, like eating a meal when hungry. It’s an equal sum game - privation on one side, satiation on the other, and a transaction, like moving food from place to place (once you’ve eaten, the privation has been transferred to the cabinet or refrigerator where the food used to be).
But such a transaction does not describe love, which can seemingly build up and grow the beloved, while consuming them, but while not reducing the ones who give love. Biological procreation, man-woman-and child, is the best metaphor for love. It is a process, a happening, in which the man seeking to consume while bringing pleasure to the wife, feels pleasure, while being consumed by the wife, and not only are they alone present to each other, but are joined by a third, a product, something sui generis, that adds to their very bodies and grows their marriage into a family; their love has begotten a third lover, a third beloved, who will add to the marriage, renaming it a “family”.
Love involves willing consent. It takes a rational, personal being, for there to be love. Love isn’t just driven by desire from the Dionysian, it is also the knower, knowing the known and sacrificing any counter-desires to focus on expressing this desire. We lose sleep, we fail to eat, we take massive risks, all to just be near to the beloved. These are acts of pure willing, grown out of pure knowing decision. The love you see between yourself and the beloved becomes a value, an object, in itself (even as if apart from the lover and the beloved). WE together have made a love that each of us sees as worth sacrificing for, and by sheer acts of will, make physical signs (knowable by others observing the love) and give testament to this thing called “our love”, climbing Mount Everest if necessary to see the beloved’s face.
Love for oneself. What does that even mean? Does it mean thinking you’re great? Like, “wow, look how strong and handsome and smart I am - and funny too - I’m hilarious.” I don’t think “love of oneself” has any meaning outside the context of living among other people. The Christian charge to “Love your neighbor as yourself” does not simply isolate a charge to “love oneself” - we aren’t charged to learn to love ourselves first, and then second, to love our neighbors like this; we are charged to simultaneously love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Self-love is born in neighborly love. Just as neighborly love is born in recognizing the similar value of others like yourself. Self love comes only as a measure, and this measure can only truly prosper (grow, live, become) when applied to those around us. This could be a whole book (involving psychology, sociology, theology). I address this because “self love” is a cool new catch-phrase trend and focus, and seems so easy to grasp; but self love, locked in isolation is not love. Self-love is better understood as treating oneself in the third person and treating oneself as a neighbor. Love yourself as your neighbor says the same thing as love your neighbor as yourself. I’d simply say, we would not be able to love at all without being shown others to love first, without the truly other to behold and to love. The charge to love the others as oneself is not about the nature of love, but a direction to focus one’s attention when expressing love, and a charge to be humble, to even be lovable by others.
There is so much more to say, and yet I feel I haven’t even addressed your question at all. What is love? I have no idea! An imagination? Seems essential to personhood, and yet what is a “person”? Love is like gravity - engulfing us all, but invisible and impossible to grasp - because it does the grasping! But any reductionist account seems to me to avoid the question in a more profound way.
Yes, you answered, and your answer is as brilliant as always.
Moreover, you made me think about something:
If we take this assertion (and I share it) as a starting point and examine it in the context of physics, we arrive at an interesting conclusion:
Love is neither substance, nor matter, nor energy, since it can simply grow infinitely without transforming one into the other. If this were not the case, then love would need to diminish something in order to magnify itself, wouldn’t it?
Therefore, from this perspective, the very question “what is love?” becomes meaningless, since it cannot be something that can be thought, imagined, measured, or even expressed.
Consequently, I take my hat off to this question, which began this discussion.
Yes. The words I used to point to “love” make zero physical sense, which points to metaphysical impossibility. They seem to point to something completely unlike substance or matter or even energy. So are we just waxing poetic here, or painstakingly digging towards the essence of love?
I see the issue, but I think we can press on. This issue arises for me because it is easy to confuse our conceptualization of “love”, our turning the experience of loving someone into a mental object for the sake discussing it, with the apparent ontologically immaterial/non-extended character of love in itself. The question “what is…anything” starts “here” and looks “there” out into space for an answer (so I certainly see the conundrum). Love cannot be measured like bodies are measured. But love remains a specific thing, or particular happening. We can measure love. We do express love. It is just very difficult to be a body, and in that body, to use words and names (mental constructs) that deal in distinctions among bodies so well, and then turn all of these mental tools on the issue of embodying in language our concept “loving”.
But ultimately, the starting point for the experience called love is bodies - at least two bodies - loving each other as each is loved by the other. By bodies here, I am forced to mean them metaphorically. I simply mean where there are not two distinct persons, neither can there be love. The question of love drained of all dimension to be placed on the blackboard in chalk as “love is X”, will never itself be love. Persons alone make love.
This, to me, shows why we cannot avoid metaphysics when having any deeply meaningful discussion. (We don’t need to do metaphysics if we do not want to, because it is too speculative maybe, but then, if we don’t do metaphysics, we cannot analyze “things” like “loving”.). This is the problem of how Platonic forms could exist (how they are not merely mental constructs), and the question of what is the ontology of seemingly immaterial, existent things.
“Love” can be distinguished from “justice”, which both can be distinguished from “universality” - yet none of these can have bodies (weight, size, etc.). Without a body, what delimits this idea from that - how can two concepts/forms/ideas be distinguished at all if there can be no material there drawing a line between them? I honestly don’t know (think it has something to do with Parmenides “It is the same thing to think as it is to be.” but I digress), but unlike everyone since Hume and Kant, I think calling love and justice “merely mental construct” is a way of avoiding so many questions shoved in our faces every day. There is an ontology of form that is simply not addressed when we avert our attention from metaphysical issues. Justice can be realized. So can love. We all just haven’t jotted down the science of it yet - it’s still there.
So I would disagree that love “cannot be something that can be thought, imagined, measured, or even expressed.” We can express and think and imagine and measure the differences between love and justice, and in doing so, we must express and think something directly about love and about justice separately, uniquely, in themselves.
“What is love?” is as impossible a question as “What is good?” or “What is truth?”, and ultimately, because of Kant, just as impossible a question as “what truly is that tree over there?” Mental phenomena locked inside a solitary subject, or direct access to objective reality, somewhere in between? Regardless, love is not justice, and both keep arising distinctly in experience.
All the most meaningful things in life to know, are laced in paradox. This makes knowing itself, a paradox. This makes meaning always incomplete. Love is as absurd a thing as is knowing the truth, or being a whole. Yet, despite being bodies, immersed in the apparent simplicity of nature, plagued with the complexity of minds, and despite the best efforts of post-modernism, we cannot shake our desire to know truth, our metaphysical sense of forces like love, justice, and good controlling our most intimate, subjective experiences.
Here is another way at this. You brought up God, so I feel I’ve been given some permission to play in theological revelation.
It is said that God is love. If love requires a lover and a beloved, how can one being BE something like love? Another absurdity.
It is also said God is one Being, but God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, which mean this one being is three persons. Well, this is more absurd. But this second absurdity allows a certain logic to the notion that God is love, because if God is three persons, and love only exists between two or more persons, than ‘God is love’ seems to begin to take shape. An absurdity, to help clarify an absurdity.
But then, the charge ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ How can I love myself, at all? How can I be my own neighbor? If made in the image of God, a single God who is Father and Son in love, then isn’t my internal desire for someone else to love me, the same desire as me seeking someone else to love? By pointing our love towards our neighbors, isn’t God just giving us a cheat sheet for where to direct our attention when seeking to participate in love at all?
Love arises where the self (lover) is given completely to the other (beloved), and the life of this self is only saved by the beloved who loves your sacrifice giving this life back to you. I give my life for the sake of another, who gives their life for my sake, and we both show ultimate love, and in perfection, both live on to be loved and to love again. God does this by nature as being three eternal persons - we do it by grace by being like him in a community (body) of many persons.
So I’ve done nothing to analytically clarify really, anything. But I still have hope in the existence of knowable love.
Love is not a thing that can be measured — but it is a structure that can be recognised. The question “what is love?” asked as “what substance is it?” — yes, meaningless. Asked as “what structure is it?” — that’s the question worth asking. The question doesn’t become meaningless. It becomes precise.
One being cannot be love — love requires relation, requires another. The contradiction seems real.
But it resolves if that one being is already internally relational by nature. Not one person alone, but three persons in eternal relation — giving, receiving, generating. The structure of love already complete within the one being.
God and love aren’t two concepts that happen to overlap. Two names for the same irreducible structure — the minimum condition for anything to exist, relate, and generate at all.
Approach it from existence — you call it God.
Approach it from relation — you call it love.
And love is knowable — not because it can be measured or fully expressed in language, but because it can be recognised.