From: fjc@mips2.ma30.bull.com (Frank Casper)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: What is Love?
Date: 9 Sep 92 15:59:06 GMT
Reply-To: fjc@mips2.ma30.bull.com (Frank Casper)
Organization: Bull Worldwide Information Systems  (Billerica, MA)


 >(Daniel Kranowski):

 > 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.

 >(Daniel Kranowski):
 > 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.

 (ONSTOTT CHARLES OR):
   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

(Dan O'Connell [CONTRACTOR])
It is still selfish: by demanding that someone else help
fill your needs. By communicating one's "falling in love"
to the beloved, one is trying to set up an obligation on
the behalf of the beloved to help take care of the initiator.

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. 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. 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. Friendship is the mutual affirmation and encouragement
of the highest and noblest between us. Friendship makes more of us than
we are as ourselves. That the lover, the friend, looks at the beloved and
sees the best and finest in his or herself reflected back is not an act of
selfishness, for this reflection cannot be demanded, like selfishness tends
to do, but can only be freely given. This corresponds to Burts notion of
a recognition.  

Surely this inspires feelings of deep affection. To this extent I'm not
concerned about "identifying" love with feelings. They're very high
feelings, and love can be viewed as the highest and noblest of feelings.
I think the effort to divorce love from feelings derives from the 
many bad experiences people tend to have with romantic attractions. 
Romantic attractions seem to intensify the development of abject
dependencies on the object of this attraction, and consequently make
us feel like we're losing control. Quite right. We are. No other person
is ever within our control in the sense that we can demand that they
feel a certain way about us, and when we "need" this way it only
tends to highten our feelings of powerlessness and isolation, even
as we are consumed sometimes in sexual absorbtion with another.

Love helps us manage and overcome these tendencies. It empowers
us to be ourselves by reinforcing a sense of self control. It reinforces
equality, not enslavement. 

fjc
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta