Love

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How does love work?

Is love contingent? A matter where people choose that which they find good, and then love it for it's goodness?

"Love is far too precious to be offered indiscriminately. It is above all in the area of love that egalitarianism ought to be repudiated. Love represents an exalted exchange--a spiritual exchange--between two people, for the purpose of mutual benefit." - Gary Hull, Objectivist philosopher

http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4896 (don't have to read the article, it is just sort of interesting)

Or is contingency debasing for love, as it makes the beloved object not really what you claim to be loved, but rather an incidental trait? After all, if you claim to love a person, and then their philosophy on life changes, and you cease to love them because of that, did you ever love them or did you love their philosophy on life, or perhaps more broadly "the person who espoused their philosophy on life"? After all, they still remain themselves, but they lose the trait of being loved.
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Or is love more properly uncontingent and specific? A mother loves her child without regard for who that child is somewhat like this, as she might still visit him in jail after he has stabbed someone in the face.

1 Corinthians 13:7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

"What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil." - Friedrich Nietzsche

This is a love for the person without as much concern for the incidental characteristics, however, is it proper? After all, if you love something without appreciating the specifics of them, then can you really be said to love them either? You just love an abstraction, but not the specific them. Not only that, but how can a specific but uncontingent love be just? There are so many beings that could be loved, but to arbitrarily pick a specific one on some whimsy? Can there be an unjust love, or is love the fulfillment of moral law?
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Is love meant to be uncontingent and universal? Should it be given to all men, because this love is the only love for individuals rather than incidentals, and it is the only way to do this and maintain justice?

Rom 13:10 ".... love is the fulfilling of the law."

Galatians 5:14 For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

"Love to one only is a barbarity, for it is exercised at the expense of all others. Love to God also!"-Friedrich Nietzsche

But is this love really given with a concern for the particulars of the beloved? Is it even possible? Could you love a Hitler? Could you love a man in China that you had never met? And if this love isn't possible, then how could we consider this love? Would it mean that nobody does or can love?
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Is love for another an impossibility?

"One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Does love combine incompatible characteristics that make our conceptions of it flawed? Is love a contingent uncontingent thing, or vice versa? Is it an uncontingent and universal thing that is impossible to ever be performed?
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Thoughts?

Ahh...Love. Strange stuff, eh? Could I love a Hitler? Yeah, I think I could, if it were my child. I know some people think love is conditional...in the sense couples my split when conditions in the relationship become unacceptable. But do they stop loving each other? If they do, I think it might not have ever been love in the first place. Relationships are most certainly conditional, but I do not think love is. Of couse I could be wrong. I can only speak from my own experience. I know what it is to love someone and still not like them one bit. Funny how that can work.

Love knows it is a greater grief to bear love's wrong than hate's known injury. ~ William Shakespeare

Love is immaterial, it doesn't exist outside human psyche, and it is a human concept used to atribuite certain emotional states and sensations towards something and someone.

The love a mother has to their child seems to be the most closed to 'pure love' than any other love, especially romantic relationships, although not all mothers are like that, and that love is expressed in different ways, which can go pleasent or unpleasent, healthy or unhealthy for the child

I would argue that love in relationships are always conditional and never unconditional, and true love in relationships is questionable to even think it actually exists, first, the physical attraction and sexual attraction are important factors in relationships, that seems to indicate that those are conditional states in order for this 'love' to develop for any partner in a relationship, that 'love' one feels about someone is atribuited to the physical aspect as well as sexual orientation, and given that it is part of a surviving instinct every species has to preserve their existence, which is about pursuing and satisfying the seek for pleasure, wether to label that "love" and to think it is unconditional is very questionable, given that it must not be conditional and be selfish after all, and not so much truthful, true love seems to be just an illusion, in that aspect.

Well, the issue is that love is often taken to refer to some ideal. Ideals are not emotional states, but founded on ideas. Even if there are certain emotional states, the question remains on whether these measure up to the ideal of love, after all, even if love is a human concept, it must be conveyed through a medium that can only express ideas rather than sensations.


Interesting, I am not surprised.

Love is one of those words that idiots delight in arguing about since it is a mental miasma enveloped in a dense fog in a snowstorm. Like perfection and beauty and other emotional personal terms it has a definite odor of carrying some undefinable unpinnable content.

I bet you write fantastic poetry, Sand. Sometime my brain runs out of breath when reading your sentences...

See:

http://www.familyhomefront.net/JanSandOne.html

http://www.artvilla.com/mair/sand.htm

I am going to bed, but it is already on my to-do list for tomorrow.

actually, the concept of love is still quite new. not that long ago people traded themselves (and their kids) in exchange for money/social status etc. nobody asked them if they "love" the person they're supposed to marry. that wasn't an issue at all.

I believe that "love" is just a meme, a product of our (pop)culture.

It's one thing to take a vague word like love and say general things about it but quite another to deny that people can have strong affections for each other.

I'm not denying that they do. but I guess you're right, I didn't give my definition- I was thinking about the (badly overexploited by film, music and literature) concept of romantic love that lasts forever.

What did Jesus tell us to do right before He went tothe cross?

He said to love one another as he has loved us...

Nothing about going to church or being religious, but that.. love one another...

Faith, charity and love, whicch one is the greatest of these?
Is not the law and the prophets fulfilled in Love?

What is love?
There are many definitions of love...
The greatest must be recognised in the example we were given to emulate... and for each person to take that journey for themselves.

Duplicate post eliminatd

Last edited by Sand on 29 Mar 2009, 1:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Frankly, I don't need Jesus or anybody else to tell me whom to love and whom not to love. I can make up my own mind in the matter.