From: onstott@a.cs.okstate.edu (ONSTOTT CHARLES OR)
Subject: Re: WHAT IS LOVE?
Organization: Oklahoma State University
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 04:41:50 GMT

From article <6294@vtserf.cc.vt.edu>, by daniel@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Daniel Kranowski):

> 
> I wrote previously:
>         I say that Love is determined individually, by what gives a
>         person pleasure, because all human action is motivated by
>         selfishness.  I do not believe in altruism; people act in ways
>         that are called "altruistic," and hence the word has value for
>         its descriptive power, but I believe "love" and "selflessness"
>         are fundamentally motivated by the needs of the self.
> 
  Perhaps you should consider empathy and compassion.


>         
> Consider the words "you...affected" in the first sentence, which more or
> less answers William Tucker's question.  If I perceive pain or distortion
> in another person, if I *empathize* with that person, I feel pain because
> of his anguish.  I want to stop his trauma fundamentally to erase my own
> pain; if I hadn't felt my own empathic pain, I wouldn't have cared about
> his.

  The question becomes:  why did you feel pain in his respect?
If love, in either respect, be selfish, and if pain be not good,
and if we really strive towards pleasure, then why would one accept
a friends pain, in the empathetic mode, at all?  

  Look up "empathy" in the dictionary, and it's defined along the lines
> of "projecting one's mind into the mind of another."  I cannot feel your
> pain simply because I am not you, but I can say, "I feel bad for you."
> I can project my mind into yours, in which case it would make me feel
> better to ease your pain.
>     Or think about it this way: a friend of yours has a bad cold, and when
> you see her, she's blowing her nose, speaking hoarsely, and has a headache.
> "I feel miserable!" she explains, and while you're with her you empathize,
> you feel bad for her misfortune.  She's a friend, and you don't like to
> see her suffer.  Later she leaves and you go your own way for the rest
> of your engagements, and soon you forget about it.  You've got your own
> work to do, you've got to talk to other people about things, and they
> occupy your mind.  Your pains are then your own. 

> The next day, you're
> about to go see your friend again and you think, "I wonder if she still has
> a cold."  That thought makes you feel bad again.  "I hope she's doing
> better."  If her pain had entered your mind frequently the previous day,
> one might say you love her.  But in the times when you weren't thinking
> about her, she was still in pain, though you were not.

  I think you are confusing "that with which you are presently concerned"
with "selfishness."

>  Love is fickle, because love is selfish.

  It seems you too have ignored mystical literature.

> because love is selfish.  I quoted Randall Holmes above saying "If your
> love is merely 'feeling good' then those who depend on the fact of your
> love for them cannot rely on it."  He later writes:
>         The sense in which faith can be a stupid policy is very simple;
>         one can have faith in persons or institutions which cannot be
>         relied upon or propositions which are false.
> 
> This is why hearts are broken.  One person puts faith in another, who
> does not meet the expectations of that faith.  Love does not always (or
> necessarily often) stabilize us -- usually we are possessed of
> conflicting emotions that make want to love and not want to love.

  This is the break down of a "romantic love" which I am not certain
is love at all.  The recast of love as selfish certainly accounts for
this problem.  However, if love is not selfish, this hardly can be
taken as love--instead love as applied here is a misnomer.

  In sum, I find the connection between love and pleasure in your
writing to be too strong to fit alternative definitions of love--as
such, I can not see you accounting for them.  Second, your recast
of love as "selfish" has allowed you to provide examples of "selfish
love" as "love" which is hardly surprising.  Third, your
empathy argument is already one step ahead of itself:  you already
felt a pain for your friend--that is the original love.  The purging
of your friends sorrow (hence again your tendancy to equate love with
pleasure) is that which you claim to be "love" in that situation 
and that which you claim to be selfish.  However, something had already
happened, when looked at honestly, that doesn't seem to have been
selfish to start.


  It
> churns our insides because we want the pleasures and satisfactions love
> brings, but we often are afraid of the rejections or loss of other
> opportunities that could accompany it.  Or perhaps we love those whom
> our parents and society make us feel we should not.

   So long as love is defined as that which brings myself pleasure,
I am already trapped into defining love as that which is selfish.
Again, I refer you to mystical literature to see a way out of this.
In terms of non-mystical literature, consider Paul's statement "Love
is patient."  Once hardly needs patience when one is dealing in pleasure.

> 
> This is definitely on the mark.  "I need you," a common expression of
> lovers, plainly demonstrates the selfishness of love.  The needs of the
> self explain why we say, "I'm falling in love"; you "fall" in love because
> you lose control, the one you love has a hold on you and power over you.
> 

  I thought you were just saying it was selfish.  Your distinction
between the feelings and policies of love does not help the matter.
IF love is a loss of self-control, a loss of power, how can it be
selfish?    If it were truly selfish, then it would hardly
be a situation anyone would want to be in.  I like to equate "falling
in love" with the potion that Tristan drank from Isolde.  But there is
another love relationship that is going on there that is hardly selfish--
you know, the one with the OTHER Isolde.  Keep in mind also that
Tristan means "Sad one"(or sad guy) which explains his selfish need
for the destructive "love" relationship with the first Isolde.  If
he had been able to get beyond the selfish issues, the other Isolde
would have been representative of that which is love.  

  From another view, Romantic love and narcisism go hand in hand---
they form a collective narcisism between the two "lovers"(much like
the collective narcisism of the love of a country).
Sometimes this narcisism gets interpreted as selfish--something which is
not always clear.


> 
> Daniel Kranowski
> email: daniel@vtserf.cc.vt.edu
> 

BCnya,
  Charles O. Onstott, III

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Charles O. Onstott, III  Account at Oklahoma State University for summer.
Graduate Student in Religious Studies           onstott@a.cs.okstate.edu
University of Chicago
------------------------------------------------------------------------

Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta