Love
"Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real."
--Iris Murdoch
A hotly debated topic. Inherently subjective.
The Greeks had three types of love:
- Agape--sacrificial love a parent has for their child. The unconditional will to do good for the other. 'Charity'
- Eros--erotic, intensely passionate, deeply sexual
I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive but I can't do you love and rhetoric without blood. Blood is compulsory -- they're all blood you see.
- -- Tom Stoppard
- An intense emotional attachment.
- A deep and tender feeling of affection towards another.
- Kinship with another.
- Recognition of attractive qualities.
- Intense desire and attraction towards another.
- Sexual passion, intercourse, or attraction.
- The object of one's affection, a name for them or it.
Verb:
- To wish for enthusiastically.
- To thrive on.
- To have sexual intercourse with.
- To act in a way which places another's needs over your own.
Philosophical Thoughts:
- Why we're on Puzzlebox.
- Love happens when you don't feel like it.
- The impelling motive of life.
- The creative, attractive force in the Universe.
- A temporary insanity.
- An allegorical personificaton of more complex emotions.
- Positive value-judgment, not uniform from individual to individual.
- A basic nature of individuals.
- Mental sustainance derived by existance of the loved subject.
- An overall expression of a state of affairs.
- An overtly strong reaction to a set of highly positive conditions.
- An aesthetic response.
- Cannot perhaps be captured in rational or descriptive language.
- A series of actions and preferences which is thereby objectively observable to oneself and others.
- An extension of the chemical-biological constituents of an individual.
- Determined by the physical mechanics of the individual.
- Reducible to the physical attractiveness of a potential mate.
- A value that transcends the particularities of the physical body.
- A private phenomenon incapable of being accessed by others.
- A non-cognitive phenomenon.
Questions Regarding:
- What are the values of Love, if any?
- Is partial love morally acceptable or permissible?
- Is it ethically acceptable to love an inanimate object?
- Is love to oneself or to another a duty?
- Should a person aim to love all people equally?
- Is love an instantiation of social dominance in either direction? Does it divide groups?
- Is it describable within the concepts of language?
- Does it exist and if so, is it knowable, comprehensible, and describable in any way?
- Is its veracity is beyond examination?
- Do we have the proper intellectual capacity to understand it?
- Is 'loving one's neighbor impartially' ethical when they might not warrent love?
- Does love require self love first? Or can it be egoless?
- Does love require 'opposite' balancing emotions, hate, fear, and associated negatives?
- Is all love a positive? In what context could it always be?
Expressions Of:
- Tail wagging.
- Language. Metaphor. Poetry.
- Music.
- Attending to.
- Sex.
- Caring.
- Listening.
- Preferring to others.
- Pink.
- Tentacles. Obviously.
- Gifts and giving.
- Bouts of giggliness.
- Gibbering and nonsensical behaviour.
- Sacrifice.
Links
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2424049 - Love may be a chemical Addiction
http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/faculty/ckaczor/marriage.html - Greek concepts of Love