Rob asked:

Your scientific definition of love (Answers 10) didn't satisfy me because, among other reasons, brains
differ and our scientific understanding of neurochemical reactions are more a generalization across
97% of the population (or less!) than they're a roadmap to our thought processes. Presumably the
capacity to love is available to every consciousness in the world.

Working off of a variety of sources (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy,Plato's Symposium et al.)
I've concluded several qualities which any definition of love should require. A lover should aim to
please the object of the love. Love necessitates an active interest in the wellbeing of the object and
love is the want of something. Love is a feeling, not just an emotion, but still it is grounded in the
physical world. Also the concept of love itself should be able to be broken down in subcategories.

My problem is that none of these criteria seem to be exclusive to the feeling commonly known as
"love". I don't know how restrictive the definition should be but if love required nothing more than
transient friendliness it would be synonymous with "like". Intuitively, it seems to me that the criteria for
"love" should be restrictive proportionate to the criteria for "hate" since they're opposites more or less
comparable in their extremes. Therefore any definition of the two has to make it as easy to love the
entire world as it does hate the world.

Do you think there's anything I'm missing in my definition, or is the intersection of all the above traits
really all it takes to consider a feeling that of love?

============

The scientific answer was really a description of what occurs chemically within the body of a person
who is in love. Presumably it was not meant to be a complete definition. Being in love is different from
loving since it involves the cloud nine feeling.

Definitions always seem to be subject to counter-examples and there are so many different types of
love. In regard to your definition, for instance, I love my mother and sister but don't aim to please
them anymore than I think they aim to please me. Also, if it is possible to love the entire world it still
wouldn't be possible to try to please it.

Perhaps the term should be restricted to human relationships. Perhaps we don't love chocolate or a
piece of music but find them delicious or delightful and use the term "love" in a metaphorical sense.
On the other hand, love may something we can't fully achieve and may emanate from something
greater than a relationship with someone or something. Consider the following:

"Freud defined it [eros] as a push from behind, a force coming out of "chaotic, undifferentiated,
instinctive energy-sources along predictable and prescribable paths toward mature life and only
partially, painfully civilized love". Whereas for Plato, eros is entirely bound up with the possibilities
ahead which "pull" one; it is the yearning for union, the capacity to relate to new forms of human
experience. It is "wholly telic, goal-directed, and moves toward the more-than-nature."

Rollo May, Love and Will

Should we define love in terms of what we think it is on the basis of experience without looking at the
source love? Trying to please someone, wanting something from them and caring about their welfare
seems to lack depth. The same is true of comparing it with hate. Is it not possible that there could be
love without hate? In which case, why should hate be relevant to the definition?

Some helpful hints I hope!

Rachel Browne

Firstly, I don't think that any answer referring solely to brain states can be given to questions to do
with concepts, beliefs, emotions and other mental states. This is because the same mental states can
be supervenient on differing brain states (as I take it that you are pointing out in your opening
remarks).

Secondly, I think that trying to define concepts/emotions/feelings like 'love' in terms of a set of
necessary and sufficient conditions (as it seems you try to do in your second paragraph) is bound to
fail. Here, I agree with the analysis given by Wittgenstein of the nature of concepts, when he
discusses the example of 'games'. He says that there is no single definition that covers all games, but
that different games are all games because they share a family resemblance — sharing some
features with other examples, but not sharing all. Further, there are not sharp boundaries between
concepts, so there is no point at which 'like' suddenly becomes 'love', as one new criterion kicks in.

Nevertheless, I think your set of criteria do seem to capture 'love' reasonably well.

Tim Sprod

Rob, yes you are missing something: the point! Let me stage an answer (with apologies to T.S Eliot,
but your predicament calls him to mind. The work of love?) If you could look at love as science does,
with eyes that fix it in a formulated phrase, and when it is formulated and sprawling on a pin, when it
is pinned and wriggling on the wall, how should you begin, how should you presume? Wouldn't you
look at love and say, "That is not it at all, that is not what I meant at all.'? I think you would. For looked
at like that, love will not sing to thee. Shouldn't you, instead of this charade, have been a pair of
ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas? Love is untotalisable by definition because it is
infinite. It is transcendent, that is the point.

Foundational to Western culture are the lines (lines which are more than mere words) that Paul
writes about love in his first letter to the Church at Corinth (1 Cor. 13). All of these things are
existential and as soon as they are abstracted they become what they are not. As well as the fact
that, lived, they are never what they are. You need a feel for the transcendent in the old fashioned
sense (not of Kant) of beyond being, beyond that which is and otherwise than it. Love is an ethic.

You presume — talk about missing the point — that the word 'love' refers to a 'thing' called love. This
Augustinian theory of language is not where language theory is at these days, after the deluge. When
I (used to) talk about love, as was my duty, with my Year 12 girls at school, (trying not to fall into it.
Love lays traps!). I would tell them that the notion is not reducible to a thing: philos, agape, eros,
storge.These four ideas mean 'love'. No wonder we are confused by the English, when the English
word is loaded with four Greek philosophical concepts and inextricable from them, and meaningless
beside them. And that is before we have even dipped into the literary tradition that grounds love in
meaning and signification in Western cultural terms, starting with Plato and Aristotle — through Paul,
Augustine, the Latin lyric — a defining moment for 'love' — Dante, Goethe and so on and so forth.

I didn't see the last answer you got — I can imagine from what you reply — but good on you for not
resting satisfied with answers, as if in expectation that thereby you will find it. This is a pointer rather
than an 'answer'. Another perspective on love of course is to be in it. What that means is an
interesting question in itself. But consider the difference between a phenomenon and a thing and that
will help you on your way I think.

Matthew Del Nevo

http://www.sicetnon.com