Recently, I came into a discussion on a topic I don't frequently talk of but do wonder about: love. The timing was apt with Saint Valentine's Day having just past, and so I decided this week to elaborate a little more on the contentious topic probably better left alone.
The discussion circled around the idea that love was not a thing, so to speak, but a choice (or perhaps better framed as "a process"). The capacity for an individual to endure hardship in the face of rationally unsalvageable odds is an act implying love. Having spent some time listening to lectures on the topic and trying myself to understand the feigned beast - I found this definition unsatisfying. Naturally, more an analyst than a feeler, I yearned to explore a broader set of possibilities before claiming fulfillment, and so you have in front of you some of the outpourings of that process. I provide herein three analytic framings under which we can approach, as foolish an idea as it is, the mysterious savior to the human condition we call "love" with the lenses of materialism, metaphysics and spirituality.
I should, choosing responsibility despite protests from the internal romantic, provide caveat emptor to the reader: this note makes only superficial scratch marks to planetary mantle of love; a more patient person would consider, in molecular specificity, the varieties of love available to human beings and their characteristics: platonic, romantic, maternal, fraternal, et cetera. I instead choose to bundle such varieties of love, abrasive a choice it is, into a singular entity so as to not drown in nuance and decision of what to include and forego before I am through with the whole thing. With these disclaimers put aside - and with the addition of yet another tally mark of debts owed to the reader - we may begin.
Materialism: A Human Phenomenon
The first terrain we encounter on our way is the muddy surface of the biological and psychological which I frame as the "materialist" perspective of love. The novel field of evolutionary psychology attempts to frame and discuss the biological and evolutionary influences that may have underpinned the development of and feature characteristic to the human psyche. While rightfully met with skepticism, it provides at least an anchoring to the predominant frame which we currently have to understanding the origins of phenotype differentiation (i.e., Evolution). On the topic of love, under the frame of evolutionary psychology - love may be viewed as a phenomena; an intangible appendage, like that of natural animal dominance hierarchies, that serves to further a species under the environmental selection conditions. Let us elaborate in speculation a few moments.
The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving…
Beyond Good and Evil, Prejudices of Philosophers #4, F. Nietzsche (1886)
We begin with an observation that a central trait to species which accelerates their fitness in the environment is rearing of social units; therein we consider, perhaps unwisely, that traits which further support and increase this cohesion amplify the fitness of the entire species (1). From this vantage point, we look then to our emotional phenomenon in question manifest as an overwhelming instinctual concern for another species member at the expense of one's own survival; love appears a sort of emergent mechanism to improve social group cohesion. We then, as human beings, in our eventual development of language, conjure a fantastic mystical incense which we burn about the topic liberating a smoke clouded veneer of images and fanaticism shrouding us from its truth (many such truths appear to enjoy this process). In short, love is merely a natural phenomenon, enchanted as we are by it, that remains a shallow pond inflated only by the limitless vanity and irrationality of human beings.
To the materialist, love as a feeling or emotion merely serves its master: nature. A useful trick by nature, which we possess no choice or will towards. This is not to minimize its significance to the human being, however. Given its fundamental interweaving with natural selection, we, as materialists, could deduce that all such advanced creatures may eventually develop the capacity for love. But at base, it is not a choice but a phenomena in which we posses no power toward.
Metaphysics: A Human Process
Now, we turn our attention elsewhere: a bridge in the clearing ahead. We move across this path in the interest of furthering our exploration. Its planks and ropes promise safety from the chasm below, but here in the perspective of metaphysics, we have the choice: shall we stay or shall we go? Although a metaphysician I am not, I imagine one might propose in a chord to the second perspective of this note that love is a process: a decision of free will under dominion of the mind.
Love is but one of the avenues that could be freely taken by the individual perpetually challenged by the present moment. Love represents an incorruptible end which, among the hierarchy of virtues, vices, and ideals the psychological architecture is built, contains one of the highest values human's can attribute because of its moral difficulty. In the same way that valor is admirable and achieved from an ethical challenge the individual faces in fear, love is the ultimate achievement to the moral challenges faced in daily life.
To use a short biblical example, Christ in his betrayal by Judas, chooses (in the emulation of the ultimate ideal in Christianity, "God") the moral path of righteousness in forgiveness out of compassion and love for his former disciple. In doing so, under the metaphysician's watchful eye, Christ is demonstrating to the individual presented a similar cross roads the choice or process that brings about a "greater end" to the collective. In other words, love is not an existent phenomena or trait one has, but a process and individual may use in order to realize the ultimate idealism of humanity (e.g, symbolically Heaven or Paradise). In this regard, love is under complete choice of the individual to exemplify (or not), but it is most certainly not "possessed" in any real sense.
Spirituality: A Human Mystery
This leads us to the third objective we now climb upon crossing the chasm: a barren desert of spirituality - our last perspective on the matter. The spiritual lens might say that love is neither a process nor phenomena - it is beyond all this; it is something like "grace" that comes only from the origin of everything (whatever spiritual vocabulary you'd like to use). We look at the various "types" of love: romantic, platonic, fraternal, maternal, et cetera, and see that they are in fact all products of the mind; fundamentally driven by the "ego" or "center". Therefore, any love conceived of by the mind in words, demonstration, or conclusion is always derived from a "self-filled" place regardless of situation. In a shorter manner of speaking: where there is choice there is no love.
It is not a phenomena in the sense that "I love my wife", for how could something outside of the "self" come into possession of another (i.e., if there is no self, who is the one who is possessing?). Equally, however, it is not a process - it cannot be chosen as there is no one to do the choosing. In this way, the purest love, according to this lens, is total freedom, non-resistance, colloquially captured as:
"If you love someone, be prepared to let them go."
Under this regime, love is not possessed, chosen, valued, pleaded for, or worshiped - it is a transient mystery which can only be defined by what it is not. It is beyond the scope of time, and beyond the dominion of the mind. You cannot seek it out - it comes to you; and in those moments, if they ever come, you are filled because "you" are no longer there.
And I said to myself quietly:
Should I have lived long enough,
To see a summer's sunset and,
Leaves fall from autumn trees,
I have seen all that was to be seen,
I have lived life in eternity.
Conclusion
No amount of lyricism can distract from the obvious reality that this analysis of love remains woefully superficial; there is much more terrain one could explore and uncover. To my better judgement, however, I will conclude here, as I still must appease the romantic within who has waited so impatiently all this while to be set free.
Love - its definition, its meaning, its purpose - may forever elude us, as its duty may prescribe it so. For this reason, it may be one of the ultimate gifts to the human condition. After all, the human being is an odd creature: always seeking to own what is not yet possessed, always wanting more than is present, always attempting to push beyond an advisable perimeter - the intellect's dual role for profit and liability; what then could make such a fruit as love so ripe and full than to perpetually remain out of our reach? That we may, in relation to the idea of love, live only a fate like that of Tantalus (the topic of a future note) but with a singular exception; we may not be able to define love - just as we cannot define water with the linguistic label "water" nor chemical description of two hydrogen atom to one oxygen - but it will always some how permeate throughout our entire existence: whether in full or in want. Like the air we breath, or food we eat, love too is within the realm of nourishment we humans seek.
So, with this all said:
Fear not if that clever vagabond eludes you,
It may do so for reasons wise:
Whence Cupid’s arrows strike heart’s surface,
It’s routinely a surprise.
Footnotes
(1) We cannot, in appreciable levels of seriousness, be certain about this assumption - there is likely some equilibrium balancing the fitness of staying together versus independence, which varies at different scales, environments, and situations - oh nuance how you drain the vitality from me so.