From: daniel@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Daniel Kranowski)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: WHAT IS LOVE?
Date: 9 Sep 92 20:40:07 GMT
Organization: Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

In article <1992Sep9.155906.27289@mips2.ma30.bull.com> fjc@mips2.ma30.bull.com (Frank Casper) writes:
 >Burt Voorhees responds:
 >In this entire discussion I haven't seen any real consideration of the
 >distinction between love and feelings.  I would like to suggest that love,
 >as love, is not a feeling at all, but a recognition.   That all the various
 >feelings that we associate with love are just our particular individual ego
 >responses to a recognition.  I'm using a definition of love that I originally
 >got from Oscar Ichazo: "Love is the recognition of the same consciousness
 >in another as in oneself."  There are a couple of corollaries to this: 1)
 >so long as a person is caught up in their own individual ego processes
 >they cannot fully recognize consciousness in another, and cannot fully
 >love (think of the lust crazed teenager who looses interest after 
 >satisfaction of desire); 2) to develop ones capacity to love it is necessary
 >to clarify one's consciousness beyond the ego controlled state we spend
 >most of our time in.
 >
>
>On the whole I think Burt has the correct approach. Depicting love
>as selfish robs us of what is quite possibly the only power among us
>that truly lures us toward an affirmation of real mutuality. 

And I hold that 'mutuality' is, at best, a fantasy.  That's why I depict
love (and everything else) as selfish.  We can apprehend or recognize
other consciousnesses to the limited extent that "empathy" provides, but
we can never exit our own consciousness.

>I'm not 
>debating the notion that selfishness is a perpectual possibility of the
>human makeup, but it is just wrong headed to make it fundamental
>to all our motivations and actions.

But that's how the self works.  What love does is make someone else "a
part of you," i.e., that person's well-being is essential to your own.
Love nourishes that part of yourself.  (It also nourishes the other
person, which is why I deem love Mutual Benefit.)

>Selfishness can be roughly understood
>as "I want what I want when I want it and that is all there is to it". It
>reduces everybody else to need fulfillers. I don't think this has anything
>to do with love, which I understand essentially to be friendship and not
>romantic love.

I dealt with this in my last post on the topic.  The conventional view
of "selfishness" sees a person who has no powers of empathy and is only
interested in the surface pleasures of his own person.  However, I have
plugged "selfishness" into a light socket and juiced it up.  Since
"love" is an internal need and/or desire (which generally benefits another
person), it falls into the domain of the self; thus it is selfish.  Acts
of love always impact first upon the lover and second upon the loved.

>I think the effort to divorce love from feelings derives from the 
>many bad experiences people tend to have with romantic attractions. 

Very apt!  I always like to know the real reason a person clings to his 
doctrine, because it is often more enlightening than the proffered view.
However, I've got to dissent on this suggested motive (if the suggestion
was linked to my views).  I was in the midst of writing a big ol' post
to explain the last bits of my thoughts on this matter (I guess it'll
have to go up tomorrow), and my motives should receive a hearing at the 
epilogue.

And this is almost it for the products of this network account.  Gotta
rush--


Daniel Kranowski
email: daniel@vtserf.cc.vt.edu  (3 days left!!)