From: daniel@vtserf.cc.vt.edu (Daniel Kranowski)
Newsgroups: sci.philosophy.meta
Subject: Re: WHAT IS LOVE?
Date: 4 Sep 92 14:09:50 GMT
Organization: Virginia Tech (VPI & SU)


--Feeling and Policy--

    There are two opinions saying that love is not just a feeling.
Chris Burman wrote:
        I think the point is that when we talk of emotions, we aren't merely 
        talking of how we feel. (I don't think it is wrong to say that emotions
        are feelings - I just don't see what we add to our understanding of 
        'emotion' by saying it.)
And later wrote:
        I seem to have thought of feelings as some kind of a state of mind, 
        or as some certain inner sensations, or whatever. (I do have a little
        problem with the words 'feeling', 'experience', 'sensation', 'emotion'.
        My ear doesn't always tell me which is the correct one, and my 
        dictionaries are only entertaining.) Someone might ask, "What are your
        feelings towards NN?", and we might answer, "I hate his guts!" or 
        (admittedly less probable), "I love her". And there is absolutely 
        nothing wrong in speaking of feelings and love/hate in the same breath.

So did you say 'emotions are more than feelings' because you thought that
feelings, being a synonym of emotions, was not definitive enough?  If Yes
to that, then you say love is an emotion and a feeling?  If No, then what
else lies in the realm of love beyond feelings?

    The second view against "merely feelings" comes from Randall Holmes.
First Dan O'Connell wrote,
        To say that love and/or hate is a "policy" would imply to me that
        one had control over what one felt, i.e., love or hate;
to which Randall Holmes responded:
        But, of course, what I am saying is that love or hate is not how you
        feel, but a principle informing your actions which may be caused
        (partially) by your feelings or have effects which are feelings.

A "principle"?  "Informing" our actions?  Are you saying that it is a
universal essence we choose to draw from, an adjective to describe
something, a motion we go through of our own accord?  I don't get this at
all.  It seems to me that you are trying to explain the place of "love"
within a sentence, but I don't have any further grasp on what you think
it _means_.  Earlier you agreed with Ken Bell that love "is usually
thought to be something stable and a stabilizing influence on humankind,"
but that also is vague, IMO.  So I ask, "what is meant, and why?"


--Pleasure--

    I knew when I first used the words "selfishness" and "pleasure" in
this thread that they would arouse visions in technicolor; they are
general and abstract, yet we've all got thorough ideas of what they mean.
We've pondered and cogitated and forged our own definitions, with bells,
whistles, and examples, and usually the total picture mostly overlaps
with everyone else's.  But the more you think about an abstraction,
however, the more easily you will misunderstand and the more easily you
will be misunderstood.  I hope this time to clarify what I mean by 
"selfishness" and "pleasure" so neither of those consequences continues.

I wrote in my original post on this topic:
        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.

"Pleasure" was a word I forged differently from the reader, apparently.
I used it synonymously with "attraction" in that post, such that I could
rewrite the above, "Love is determined individually, by what attracts a
person."  (In this post I shall ignore how the attractions are determined,
and the ramifications of that beginning.)  Humans are complex and
intricately contrived creatures, so we are attracted to many things,
even those things that do not appear to be 'in our interests.'  Some
persons are drawn to physical pain; others feel satisfied only when
they give their money and strength to the needy; and yet others desire
to bring happiness to those around them.  And when a person's efforts
attain the object of his attractions, I say he finds pleasure.

    When I quoted the above selection in my last post, it caused no end
of troubles for Charles Onstott III, who assumed I was only concerned
with immediate, personal pleasure at its bubbling surface.  He wrote:
        Perhaps you should consider empathy and compassion.
        [..]
        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.

    First, our attractions are not solely to physical stimuli, or to
monetary gains, or to feelings of importance and grandeur; pleasure looks
different to every individual, and satisfaction often comes from pain
or duty.  (Though I generally dislike Aristotle's Ethics, I feel sorry
for the abuse heaped on the dead guy for his use of 'eudamonia' --
they are quick to misunderstand who see 'happiness' or 'pleasure' through
modern-repressive eyes rather than his.)  One thing the reader should
glean from this is "selfish" is not necessarily the antithesis of "good."
    To your second point, the transitive property is hardly surprising,
either.  If I explain what gives us pleasure, then what the self is, and
from these arrive at a connection between the two, you'd do well to look
at the argument rather than invent a spurious circularity.
    And third, yes the presence of love in X is why he feels pain at Y's
pain.  To restate something Randall Holmes said (to make it agree with
my view :-), X's love regards the good of Y as essential to his own.
Thus X loves Y.  If Y is unhappy, X cannot be satisfied.


--Selfishness--

    So I'll continue to explain why indeed it is "selfish to start" with.
Charles Onstott III also wrote:
        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.

And it seems you have ignored my initial post on the matter.  I am citing
it at length here, but please go back to the original.  It is message-id
6166@vtserf.cc.vt.edu, article 3682 (I don't know which of these
conventions is fixed for all sites on the usenet), and I think it covers
nearly all the bases.  Here is another slice:
            So let us look at "selfless" love again.  Romantically or among
        friends, we look at it with admiration and amazement because it is 
        sacrifice, it goes against the self-interest of the lover: a man or 
        woman may wait in the rain for hours, waiting for the other to appear; 
        one loses sleep and skips other engagements to prepare something special 	for the beloved; they are so kind and benevolent to one another, it 
        brings a smile to our heart.  Or consider saintly love, doing the same
        thing for a complete stranger; a samaritan helping a person crouching in
        the gutter, giving him food and clothes and shelter, though the person
        might as soon have killed him.  The samaritan endangers his life and
        lives ascetically so that he might benefit the interests of others
        rather than himself.
             But why do they do it?  For what reason other than selfless,
        altruistic Love?  I hold that it is love, but not selfless.  It is the
        human invention of Mutual Benefit, without which the institutions of
        society could not exist.  The lover's self is so constituted that he 
        feels pleasurable sensations from knowing he has brought pleasure to
        someone else.  He may undergo certain physical discomforts to receive a
        greater emotional satisfaction that comes from expressing his love.  A
        word on love from "duty": attraction to duty is as valid an attraction
        as one to physical pleasure.  It all depends upon his hierarchy of 
        pleasures, determined for him by his DNA and by his upbringing.

Empathy, compassion, and love are all legitimate feelings, but I declare
that they are selfish in their own way.  The way I see it, there is very
little difference between "that with which we are presently concerned" and
"selfishness."  I have been discussing this off-line with Edward Faith,
who offers a good insight into the usual definition of selfishness.
He wrote:
        So when we consider love, the question is, does the person desire his
        own pleasure consciously, or does he not?  Think about it!  You surely
        can imagine a person who thinks about his feelings as such, and who has
        desires in relation to them.  This person is being selfish.  On the
        other hand, a person who has his attention directed towards another
        person desires their happiness, but cannot be said to desire his own
        happiness, because he is not thinking of it as such.  Is it not clear
        how much more selfish is a person who consciously desires his own
        happiness?

This is how people typically use the word "selfish," in order to describe
someone with no powers of empathy or self-sacrifice, and who loves only
himself.  This indeed fits my definition of selfishness, but I cogitated
and forged my way far north of this, to the realm of all that concerns the
self.
    I have two points to make.  First, what concerns the self: anything
and everything you do!  Edward Faith wrote:
        ...there can exist desires which do not relate to any future change
        in the self.  If this is so, then it is absurd to use the word 
        "selfish" about love, because a selfish desire is directed towards 
        the benefit of the self.

But I hold that there are no utterly external desires.  As I said above,
because humans are intricate and variegated inventions, different notions
and "pleasures" will flip different switches in all of us; I add to this
that everything we think, do, and observe provides a stimulus to one or
more of these switches.  All these switches collectively represent the
*self*, they define who we are.  Everything that happens to us pulls
one of these switches, and evokes a reaction either positive, negative,
or indifferent.  This reaction is stored in the brain, and though it may
be forgotten from conscious memory, it has a permanent effect on the self.
    Recall that people are attracted to all sorts of behavior, because
"pleasure" looks different to everyone.  Most of us are attracted to
actions that support another's happiness without regard to our own;
this behavior may not put a grin on our lips, but it satisfies a part
of our self, a *need* of our self, that desires to make others happy.
Certainly it helps that other person, but it does something for us.
It is beneficial to the other person, but it is also selfish.  There is
no other word that describes it so well.
    Not only that, the only internal reason for action, consciously
recognized or not, is for another internal effect.  Wittgenstein's
Brown Book concludes by saying that anything we do or say may provide
a reaction from another person, but we can never know the true effect
on that person.  That is because we simply are not that person, and
never can be.  Empathy is the attempt to project one's mind into
another's, but this is just a trick of one's own mind.  The skull is
still the impenetrable barrier between our minds.  We can never know
exactly and truly how the other person reacts and what he thinks, so
we are forever limited to our own satisfaction.

    My second point concerns love in the perspective of selfishness.
Love is generally seen as self-denial, and selfishness as self-
absorption.  But we are limited to the neural mathematics of our own
selves, so love merely denies those parts of our selves that are the
most superficial, and commonly perceived "selfishness" is a lack of
imagination regarding these superficialities in the minds of others.
(As I indicated before, in this post I will skip the origination of our
selves and the ramifications of the method underlying our personal
switchboards; this second point is the link to that subject.)
    Love is giving up your free time to do something special for your
loved one.  Love is giving a meal to someone in the street who looks
hungry.  Love is staying alert to anything that might endanger your 
loved one.  Love is paying attention to what the other person says and 
really thinking about it.  But what is it worth?
    For most of us, acts of love give a superficial pleasure to another
while fulfilling a deep pleasure within us.  (Although we often also
undergo a deep pleasure from being loved.)  Love points back to the
lover.  It is denial of the most shallow of personal wants for the
satisfaction of the deeper imperatives; the two often conflict, which
is why love is not always easy.  But death for your country or for your
family is selfish.  There is no other way it can be.


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