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Location: RSVP (
but Loop - ish :)
Time : 7pm to 10pm ish
RSVP for directions
Inspired by the narration in the movie March of the Penguins we thought we would explore what love really is. Do penguins and other animals feel it? Is it one phenomenon or many? What good is it, apart from selling pop music? Have the philosophers and biochemists come any closer to understanding and possibly bottling it? Where do you find the really good stuff? Tips and tragedies are all welcome.
Thanks to everyone who sent suggestions for articles. I've edited some and chose from the overlapping ones. I hope they still make sense.
Bring drinks and snacks to share
The
documents are also available at the PAN web site:
https://www.angelfire.com/ult/pan/
General:
The articles are the basis for the
discussion and reading them helps give us some common ground and focus for the
discussion, especially where we would otherwise be ignorant of the issues. The
discussions are not intended as debates or arguments, rather they should be a
chance to explore ideas and issues in a constructive forum Feel free to bring
along other stuff you've read on this, related subjects or on topics the group
might be interested in for future meetings.
GROUND RULES:
* Temper the urge to speak with the
discipline to listen and leave space for others
* Balance the desire to teach with a
passion to learn
* Hear what is said and listen for what
is meant
* Marry your certainties with others'
possibilities
* Reserve judgment until you can claim
the understanding we seek
Well I guess that's all for now.
Colin
Any problems let me know..
847-963-1254
tysoe2@yahoo.com
The
Articles:
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March
of the Penguins" Too Lovey-Dovey to Be True? Hillary
Mayell
Ever
since Walt Disney immortalized interspecies friendships and talking teapots,
anthropomorphism (attributing human traits and emotions to animals or objects)
has been a movie staple. Now some scientists are
criticizing the movie March of the
Penguins for portraying the Antarctic seabirds almost as tiny, two-tone
humans. The
poster for the surprise hit film reads, "In the harshest place on Earth
love finds a way." And the movie describes the annual journey of emperor
penguins to their breeding grounds as a "quest to find the perfect mate
and start a family" against impossible odds. The penguins are the only
animals that make a home above the ice in the subzero temperatures and
blistering winds of the Antarctic winter. They overcome incredible odds just
to survive, never mind breed and nurture new life.
But
is it love?
The
filmmakers behind the English-language version of March
of the Penguins—which is distributed by Warner Independent Pictures
and National Geographic Feature Films—toned down the anthropomorphism of the
original, French release. In the original documentary the penguins
"spoke" their own dialogue, like Bambi or Babe the pig. The version
released in the United States uses a narrator, actor Morgan Freeman, to tell
the story. Still, the film describes the emperor penguins as "not that
different from us" in their pouting, bellowing, and strutting.
The
bond between the star penguin parents is called a "love story." And
the penguins seem to have emotions—grieving over the loss of an egg or a
chick, rejoicing at the return of a mate, loving their families. "In a
few places it's a little over the top," said Alison Power, director of
communications for New York City's Bronx Zoo and the affiliated Wildlife
Conservation Society. "But I thought the filmmakers did an excellent job
in not anthropomorphizing the animals." Marine biologist Gerald Kooyman
studies penguins at Antarctica's and
he begs to differ. He said the portrayal of the penguins' mating rituals, as a
love story is a "major" case of anthropomorphism.
So
do the birds experience emotions at all? "Zoologists would say, Probably
not," said Kooyman, who works for the Scripps Institution of
Oceanography. "A lot of what looks to us like love or grief is probably
hormonally driven more than some kind of attachment" to the egg, chick,
or partner, he said. For instance, there are
several scenes in the film when a parent seems to grieve over a broken egg
doomed never to hatch, or appears to mourn over the body of its frozen chick. "The
adult would not recognize the chick after it's frozen," Kooyman said.
"The main recognition between the adults and chick is the call. If a
chick can't call back, the adult won't pay any attention to it."
Instinct, hormones, and the drive to reproduce influence a lot of the penguin
behavior, Kooyman said.
"What
gives the impression sometimes of sorrow is that they fool around with the
[broken or frozen] egg, or other birds try to take an egg away," Kooyman
said. "There's just a drive to incubate, to participate in breeding
behavior at that time of year for these birds."
The
film also shows multiple shots of two adult penguins cuddling side by side,
their beaks touching and forming almost a heart shape. It looks like love, but
is it? Despite the beautiful imagery, it's not certain that each posturing
pair is actually a mated pair. "If it's in August or September, the two
are probably mates," Kooyman said. "In April it could easily be two
birds that get together and then decide that they wouldn't make good partners.
"You also see such posturing at the ice's edge. There's a lot of social
behavior between adults," he added.
Unlike
nesting birds, penguin parents actually spend very little time together. The
penguins make the grueling journey across some 70 miles (110 kilometers) of
Antarctic ice each April to return to the breeding grounds where they were
born. After the courtship period, the couple forms a strong bond until the egg
is laid in May or early June. However, as soon as the egg is transferred to
the father, the mother takes off to return to her feeding grounds. She returns
some two months later. The starving male, who hasn't had a meal in months,
immediately leaves.
The two
trade off rearing their fish and returning to the sea to feed for about five
months, until the chick is old enough to be left on its own. After that point
the parents will probably never see each other—or their offspring—again.
"In a way, the film anthropomorphized the lives of the penguins, but I
think it's OK," Kooyman said. "Simplifying some aspects of the
penguins' life story makes it more accessible to the general public."
BTW
:
1.
Does anyone else find it strange that the same people who have been jealously
defending the boundaries between humans and animals, in order to justify the
unique human possession of souls, and hence their right to eat veal cutlets,
are now ready to blur that distinction as evidence of God’s intelligent
design.
2. How intelligent a design is it to have any living thing waddle miles across the ice, then freeze its nether regions off while sitting on the hope of the future?
A
piece on how love has evolved over time.( Edited)
Language
and Evolution: Homepage Robin Allott
Empathy
and love develop and are expressed above all in the family, in love between
parents, in love of parents for children, in the solidarity of the family,
which can be seen as the nucleus round which wider group feeling develops.
Empathy and love extend from the family group to wider social organisations
and ultimately to the community as a whole, the people, the nation. Love is
not simply an aspect or an intensification of empathy nor is it to be
identified with sexuality, which results in patterns of behaviour nearly
universal amongst all living creatures other than the most primitive. Though
empathy and sexuality are apparent in the behaviour of animals, by contrast
there is little evidence of love in anything resembling the human sense in
patterns of animal behaviour.
Love
appears to be an eminently human phenomenon. We need to consider the
evolutionary role of love; the evolutionary potential of love; the
significance of love for survival of the individual and of the group,
including the prolongation of this evolution into historical development, for
example, of the Christian conception of love. Love in its most developed form
is to be seen not as a lucky accident, an undeserved blessing for humanity,
but as an explanation of and a necessity for the course which human
development has taken. There remains the need for a more rigorous 'scientific'
treatment of love in a much more basic sense which would explain love as a
physiological/neurological pattern of inter-personal behaviour or of
individual experience.
It
is obviously important to start by defining or characterising love. So what is
love? Any woman's magazine has descriptions of true love in terms of the
relation of man and woman. There are other types of love, mother/infant,
brother/brother, plus a scatter of other uses of the term love of animals,
love of the countryside, love of excitement, love of truth etc. The Oxford
English Dictionary defines love as: "That state or feeling with regard to
a person which arises from recognition of attractive qualities, from sympathy
or from natural ties, and manifests itself in warm affection and
attachment". This is not bad though by using 'affection' and 'attachment'
the definition in the end dodges the problem. For affection, the OED has,
surprisingly, nothing very helpful referring to 'affect': 'affectionate' has
'loving' as its most relevant meaning. For 'attachment' the OED has
'affection, devotion, fidelity' so as usual dictionary definitions go round in
a circle. Perhaps the more useful ways of saying what love is are 1. to see
how it has been described by a multitude of writers over the ages as a matter
of personal experience, 2. by examining one's own experience which will tell
one when the state of 'love' is experienced. In the end to say what 'love'
means is much the same as saying what 'red' or 'pleasant' means. We just know.
Little progress has been made in the more fundamental approach of saying what
the behaviour and experience of love comprises and what the
neurological/physiological substrates are.
Human
love as we experience it, as it is reported and manifested, is essentially a
relation between one person and another, not a bodily relation but a
brain-relation, a neural relation; the existence and the structure of another
person comes to be a prominent part of one's own structure, to alter the
patterns of motivation, to alter the way the world and other people are
perceived and of course to alter how the other person the object or subject of
love is perceived. Without the development of the self, of self-consciousness,
of conscious thought, human love would not exist, or would have a completely
different character. But what contributed to or constituted the formation of
the self, of consciousness, of thought? The most obvious candidate is the
development of language, a new resource to enable the individual to categorise
his world, to manipulate his perceptions of the world, to put a distance
between immediate experience and 'himself'. Thus the contention is that the
development of language played an essential role in allowing the development
of human consciousness, of the self, of the person, and that this development
of the self through language was an essential preliminary to, or concomitant
with, interacting with, the development of human love as the experienced
relation between one's self and the self of another human.
Insert
here some questions: is love a momentary or enduring state? Love is not
passion, it may even not even be correctly described as an emotion in the
sense that an emotion is a response, most probably a motor and physiological
response, to a particular situation, a particular set of events. Love on the
view just presented is a capacity derived from neural interaction of a number
of components, with the decisive event being a neural restructuring to
accommodate the idea of another's self with and into the idea of one's own
self. Love thus is something that can endure and unlike sexual desire cannot
be satisfied or dissipated by any behavioural response. Sexual desire is
certainly a powerful drive which is more likely to conflict with love than to
strengthen it - sexual desire, when its object is achieved, indeed may kill
the particular love relation.
Is
love unitary or multiple? The capacity for love comes into existence from the
combination of the other capacities already described. The decisive event is
the 'falling in love' which happens almost automatically in the mother/infant
relation but needs to be explained in other forms of love. Apart from the
mother/infant relation, this capacity to love exists whether or not an object
of the love currently has been found. It alters social relationships, deepens
the awareness of the character, attitudes, tendencies of others, and so has a
general effect within the community. When this capacity finds its object, the
other person, then the neural structuring of the loving individual undergoes a
massive change, with the self-centre, the centre of gravity, changing as a
result of continuous awareness of the other, sensitivity to the other's needs,
emotions, physical condition, happiness, response etc. At this moment then
love is unitary and it is improbable that there can be two objects of love at
the same time. This contrasts with the case for sexuality, sexual desire,
where, certainly for the male, there can be many objects simultaneously.
Can
there be degrees of love? For the individual, the force of love depends on
his/her own neural structure. In the same way as self-awareness may vary
between individuals, perceptiveness may vary, empathetic awareness may vary.
So between individuals the degree of love may vary. The question remains
whether for the same individual there can be degrees of love. Can we love
someone a little, rather more, very much? If love is restructuring to
incorporate a model of the other's self with one's own self, then love is all
or nothing, and other relations, attachments, call for another description,
affection, kindness etc. Can love be mistaken in its object? There can clearly
can be mistakes in the perception of the character, attitudes, etc. of another
as there can be mistakes in all forms of perception. But if love establishes
itself despite the mistaken perception, then the love is not mistaken, though
expectations as to what may follow from the love may be mistaken. In
particular, the belief that the other experiences love in the same way as one
oneself does, may be mistaken. But to experience love it is not necessary that
love should be returned. We can love those who do not love us.
What
does love actually do? There are the objective or external effects of love and
the internal or subjective effects. As regards objective or external effects,
in the mother/infant case love helps survival of the child and its emotional
and social maturation. In an adult relation, the objective effect of love is
to promote the interests, security and happiness of the loved person, creating
a willingness to sacrifice everything, even life, for the loved person. As
regards the subjective or internal effects, in the case of the mother/child
relation love makes possible a heightened degree of perception, attention,
concentration in the mother, organises her responses for the benefit of the
child, creates endurance of the stress of care for the infant. In the case of
adult love, the internal subjective effect is the creation of a new
directedness in the one who loves, an overflow of energy, a reduction in
concentration on the self.
Is
love genetic or cultural or a mixed product? Since the capacity for love is
the resultant of a number of other evolving capacities, language, empathy,
self-awareness, consciousness, the question reduces itself to how far each of
these capacities is genetic or cultural. Empathy is genetic not cultural; the
capacity for language evolved genetically with the structure of language
evolving culturally; self-awareness flows from language. The conclusion
perhaps is that the distinction between what is genetic and what is cultural
is one which it is not easy to make. Insofar as humans thrive, indeed can only
exist, in groups and 'culture' is a group-related concept, and insofar as the
fortunes of the group and the behaviour of members of the group have directly
genetic consequences, the tangle cannot be straightened out.
Are
infant-love and adult-love related? The capacity for love evolved in the
context of the mother/infant relation and it was from this that love derived
its first evolutionary importance. But the infant in the mother/infant
relation was in due course the adult. The infant participated in the
love-relationship as much as the mother; the infant in due course became the
mother of the future; the child of a loving mother would be more likely to
inherit the capacity to love of the mother and to have experienced development
of that capacity as an infant. If love was an evolutionarily successful
process, then it would increasingly be a constituent of adult behaviour; adult
love and mother/infant love on this view are expressions of one and the same
capacity.
Are
the phylogeny and ontogeny of love related? The previous paragraph suggests
that they must be. For the individual, the first experience of love is as an
infant. The genetic capacity for love depends on the parents of the infant and
the complex of genes bearing on the congeries of abilities etc. which make
possible the capacity for love. Assume that an infant inherits the complex of
genes which will make love possible: if the infant experiences love in the
mother/infant relation, then the capacity for love can mature and the
existence of this capacity will be manifest in the adult. If, however, as a
result of the illness or death of the mother, separation, institutional
upbringing, the process of maturation of the capacity for love is interrupted
or crippled, the child may grow up into an adult without the neural
structuring, behavioural structuring, necessary for the expression of the
capacity to love. In earlier times an infant experiencing these situations
might not have survived at all.
What
is the physiological or neurological basis of love? Love may have all sorts of
physiological effects: sharpening of perception, increase of energy, increase
of purposefulness, improvement of health, complexion, brightness etc. This
represents as yet difficult to identify changes in neural structure, neural
functioning. Perhaps the most important will be the greater neural
integration, the reduction of energy-sapping conflicts, of self-centred worry
etc.
What
is the nature of the 'resonance' of love? Since love depends on perception and
particularly on empathy, then the 'resonance' of love is an effect of the
potential 'resonance' of perception and of empathy. If I can empathise your
emotional state, attitude, then this empathy alters me, alters my state. You
can empathise the change in my state and this in turn alters your state and so
on., a kind of continuous reflection between mirrors back and forth, except in
this case each mirror changes as it reflects back the other. Hence the
liebesglanz, the eyelock.
Has
love a future? The capacity to love already exists in the human genome,
insofar as the genome encodes, epigenetically, the capacities for
consciousness, self-awareness, empathy, language. But we are now in a quite
different evolutionary situation. Failures of love are not necessarily
penalised by the death of unloved children. Failures of love at the adult
level are not penalised by the exclusion of the unloved or the unloving from
the ability to reproduce. The existence of adult love does not necessarily
lead to the production of loved children (contraception, abortion etc.) The
use of drugs may destroy the mother/infant relation without destroying the
infant. The current problem is the relation of sexuality and love. Sexuality
is not love but it is confused with love. The technology of sexuality has
advanced, to stimulate, prevent, and distort the outcome of sexuality. One
might say that, in the present evolutionary period,sexuality has no very
important positive consequences whereas love has, and has had, many positive
consequences for human individuals and human societies.
Without
love, what happens? The use of drugs is an important case. Drugs constitute a
going into oneself, away from others, a reduction in the capacity for relation
to another person or other persons, including the infant as well as the adult.
If in this way, the mother/infant relation fails or is distorted or
inadequate, then the physical health of the child may be damaged - the mother
may even transmit disease and addiction to the child - and even more
importantly the child's maturation into a sociable, potentially loving adult
is damaged. For adults, there is always a confrontation between the capacity
for love and sexuality, the other-centred and the self-centred structure. The
family, the group, the nation, ultimately depend for their strength on
prevalence of an other-centred structure. If love is weakened or absent or
replaced by drugs and sexuality, then the family, the group and ultimately the
nation are weakened, on a path towards disintegration as the number of those
who lack the capacity to love or replace it by drugs and sexuality increases.
The
mother/infant relation, mother/infant love, was an evolutionarily virtuous
circle; and the ontogenetic mother/infant relation, mother/infant love is a
socially virtuous circle. The more adequate the mother/infant relation in
developing the capacity for love, in serving the transmission of social and
cultural structures to help the child to fit into the community in which it
finds itself, the better able the future adult is to transfer the acquisitions
both to participation in the community and to the relation with his/her own
children and so on. Without love, there is an evolutionary and ontogenetic
vicious circle. The distortion or absence of mother/infant love damages the
capacity not only for normal adult love but also for all good empathetic
relationships within the group, and then reduces the chances of an adequate
future mother/infant, parent/infant relationship; sexuality and drugs in the
absence of love in this generation lead to more sexuality and drugs without
love in the next generation, and to the progressive disintegration of family,
society and nation.
Offshoots
of love? Insofar as love involves concern for the other rather than only for
oneself, and softens and strengthens relations within the family, the group
and the nation, then it tends to produce lasting beneficial changes, advances,
which enrich the family, the group and the nation. Many of the cultural
achievements of humanity derive from love or have been closely associated with
love: poetry, song. music, painting, intellectual achievements of many kinds.
There
remains one special attribution of love, religious love. Can there be
religious love? This is said in the Western Christian tradition to take two
forms: love thy neighbour and love God. Other religions have developed intense
practices of the 'mystical' love of God, or of gods, though non-Christian
religions place less or no emphasis on love of one's fellow-man as such. Love
of one's neighbour, that is, love of those near to us, those who associate
with us, can be seen as a plausible extension of love as a human capacity - in
other terms, it would be extension to the group of love for another individual
person, an overspill or offshoot of that love, related to the role of love as
a socialising force described above in the mother/infant relation, though one
would not expect the same intensity as in interpersonal love. The love of God
is a more difficult idea. If love is a transfer of the self-centre, the centre
of gravity of oneself, with the incorporation of a model of the other along
with or in the model of one's self, then how can a model of God be said to be
incorporated in or introduced alongside the model of one's self? What can we
know about God or how can we empathetically perceive God? This remains a
puzzle despite the voluminous writings of the mystics, both Christian and non-
Christian.
CONCLUSION
Love
has had a very good press for thousands of years (as the quotations in the
Annex show). A Martian might judge, and he would not be far wrong, that love
is the principal concern of humans. Nowadays perhaps one may start to feel a
growing disgust (or contempt) for this preoccupation of humanity with the
unceasing flow of popular songs, magazine and tabloid newspaper articles on
the theme of love (mostly what Fromm would call 'pseudo-love'). Nevertheless
we cannot ignore love as an experience, as a fact; we cannot treat it as
trivial, familiar and so well understood. The power of love can tell us
something about our natures. Love is treated as an exciting mystery; Herbert
Spencer said that mind can be understood only by observing how mind evolved;
one might say similarly that love can be understood only by finding out how
love evolved. This paper is an essay towards this: it suggests that love
resulted from a combination based on what the Greeks called - love between
parents and children extended to apply to all forms of other-regarding love;
it depended on the growth, through language, of the sense of one's own self
and the self of others; empathy made possible the visible, or visual,
conversation between two persons, mirroring each other, most obviously
demonstrated in the smile reflected, back and forth, by which the essence of
love, the change in the neural representation of oneself to incorporate a
model of the other takes place.
One
could of course compose a panegyric of love, and many have done so. For
example, love is the dissolution of the obsession of one's self; love is the
road to understanding and the grasp of reality, the sympathy for existence; by
loving we sense and know the reality and independence and beauty of others;
intellect needs love to avoid losing itself in the dry desert; love needs
intellect to escape drowning. We float with intellect; we quench our thirst
with love. Love is a total state of organisation, Love is as specific for
humanity as language. 'Love', as a principle of human existence, was a great
discovery, a great gift. Love allows us to go beyond ourselves, overleap body,
brain, mind, reach a Here-Now which is not our private Here-Now, a new
dimension in which we can travel. Bertrand Russell in Marriage and
Morals(1929) said that love was something far more than desire for sexual
intercourse: it was the principal means of escape from the loneliness which
afflicts most men and women throughout the greater part of their lives. Love,
the capacity to love and be loved, was an evolutionary step forward in man - a
civilising, elevating experience.
Such
is the kind of panegyric one could produce which could be criticised as
ignoring the problems, the griefs, also associated with love. With it one
might contrast the unsentimental possibility that if we come to understand
better the process and state of love, through seeing how love may have
developed phylogenetically and ontogenetically, then at some time in the
future we may be able to produce a computer analog of love as the mutual
interaction of two continually complexifying programs. A sad prospect!
**************************************************************************************************************************************************************************8
A
more in depth piece on how philosophers have tried to explain love; and mostly
failed to some degree – which I find rather reassuring
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/love/
This
essay focuses on personal love, or the love of particular persons as such.
Part of the philosophical task in understanding personal love is to
distinguish the various kinds of personal love. For example, the way in which
I love my wife is seemingly very different from the way I love my mother, my
child, and my friend. This task has typically proceeded hand-in-hand with
philosophical analyses of these kinds of personal love, analyses that in part
respond to various puzzles about love. Can love be justified? If so, how? What
is the value of personal love? What impact does love have on the autonomy of
both the lover and the beloved?
In
ordinary conversations, we often say things like the following:
However,
what is meant by ‘love’ differs from case to case. (1) may be understood
as meaning merely that I like this thing or activity very much. In (2) the
implication is typically that I find engaging in a certain activity or being a
certain kind of person to be a part of my identity and so what makes my life
worth living; I might just as well say that I value
these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate a mode of concern that cannot
be neatly assimilated to anything else. Thus, we might understand the sort of
love at issue in (4) to be, roughly, a matter of caring about another person
as the person she is, for her own sake. (Accordingly, (3) may be understood as
a kind of deficient mode of the sort of love we typically reserve for
persons.) Philosophical accounts of love have focused primarily on the sort of
personal love at issue in
(4); such personal love will be the focus here.
Even
within personal love, philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have
traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called
“love”: eros, agape,
and philia. It will be useful
to distinguish these three and say something about how contemporary
discussions typically blur these distinctions (sometimes intentionally so) or
use them for other purposes.
‘Eros’
originally meant love in the sense of a kind of passionate desire for an
object, typically sexual passion. Nygren (1953a,b) describes eros
as the “‘love of desire,’ or acquisitive love” and therefore as
egocentric (1953b, p. 89). Soble (1989b, 1990) similarly describes eros
as “selfish” and as a response to the merits of the beloved—especially
the beloved's goodness or beauty. What is evident in Soble's description of eros
is a shift away from the sexual: to love something in the “erosic” sense
(to use the term Soble coins) is to love it in a way that, by being responsive
to its merits, is dependent on reasons. Such an understanding of eros
is encouraged by Plato's discussion in the Symposium,
in which Socrates understands sexual desire to be a deficient response to
physical beauty in particular, a response which ought to be developed into a
response to the beauty of a person's soul and, ultimately, into a response to
the form, Beauty.
Soble's
intent in understanding eros
to be a reason-dependent sort of love is to articulate a sharp contrast with agape,
a sort of love that does not respond to the value of its object. ‘Agape’
has come, primarily through the Christian tradition, to mean the sort of love
God has for us persons, as well as our love for God and, by extension, of our
love for each other—a kind of brotherly love. In the paradigm case of God's
love for us, agape is
“spontaneous and unmotivated,” revealing not that we merit that love but
that God's nature is love (Nygren 1953b, p. 85). Rather than responding to
antecedent value in its object, agape
instead is supposed to create
value in its object and therefore to initiate our fellowship with God (pp.
87–88). Consequently, Badhwar (2003, p. 58) characterizes agape
as “independent of the loved individual's fundamental
characteristics as the particular person she is”; and Soble (1990, p. 5)
infers that agape, in
contrast to eros, is
therefore not reason dependent but is rationally “incomprehensible,”
admitting at best of causal or historical explanations]
Finally,
‘philia’ originally meant
a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one's
friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one's
country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977). Like eros,
philia is generally (but not
universally) understood to be responsive to (good) qualities in one's beloved.
This similarity between eros
and philia has led Thomas
(1987) to wonder whether the only difference between romantic love and
friendship is the sexual involvement of the former—and whether that is
adequate to account for the real differences we experience. The distinction
between eros and philia
becomes harder to draw with Soble's attempt to diminish the importance of the
sexual in eros (1990).
Maintaining
the distinctions among eros, agape,
and philia becomes even more
difficult when faced with contemporary theories of love (including romantic
love) and friendship. For, as discussed below, some theories of romantic love
understand it along the lines of the agape
tradition as creating value in the beloved (cf. Section
4.2), and other accounts of romantic love treat sexual activity as merely
the expression of what otherwise looks very much like friendship.
In
providing an account of love, philosophical analyses must be careful to
distinguish love from other positive attitudes we take towards persons, such
as liking. Intuitively, love differs from such attitudes as liking in terms of
its “depth,” and the problem is to elucidate the kind of “depth” we
intuitively find love to have. Some analyses do this in part by providing thin
conceptions of what liking amounts to. Thus, Singer (1991) and Brown (1987)
understand liking to be a matter of desiring, an attitude that at best
involves its object having only instrumental (and not intrinsic) value. Yet
this seems inadequate: surely there are attitudes towards persons intermediate
between having a desire with a person as its object and loving the person. I
can care about a person for her own sake and not merely instrumentally, and
yet such caring does not on its own amount to (non-deficiently) loving her,
for it seems I can care about my dog in exactly the same way, a kind of caring
which is insufficiently personal for
love.
It
is more common to distinguish loving from liking via the intuition that the
“depth” of love is to be explained in terms of a notion of identification:
to love someone is somehow to identify
yourself with him, whereas no such notion of identification is involved in
liking. As Nussbaum (1990, p. 328) puts it, “The choice between one
potential love and another can feel, and be, like a choice of a way of life, a
decision to dedicate oneself to these values rather than these”; liking
clearly does not have this sort of “depth.” Whether love involves some
kind of identification, and if so exactly how to understand such
identification, is a central bone of contention among the various analyses of
love.
In
what follows, theories of love are tentatively and hesitantly classified into
four types: love as union, love as robust concern, love as valuing, and love
as an emotion. It should be clear, however, that particular theories
classified under one type sometimes also include, without contradiction, ideas
central to other types. The types identified here overlap to some extent, and
in some cases classifying particular theories may involve excessive
pigeonholing. (Such cases are noted below.)
The
union view claims that love consists in the formation of (or the desire to
form) some significant kind of union, a “we.” A central task for union
theorists, therefore, is to cash out just what such a “we” comes
to—whether it is literally a new entity in the world somehow comprised of
the lover and the beloved, or whether it is merely metaphorical.
Scruton,
writing in particular about romantic love, claims that love exists “just so
soon as reciprocity becomes community: that is, just so soon as all
distinction between my interests and your interests is overcome” (1986, p.
230). The idea is that the union is a union of concern, so that when I act out
of that concern it is not for my sake alone or for your sake alone but for our
sake. Fisher (1990) holds a similar, but somewhat more moderate view, claiming
that love is a partial fusion
of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. What is
striking about both Scruton and Fisher is the claim that love requires the actual
union of the lovers’ concerns, for it thus becomes clear that they conceive
of love not so much as an attitude we take towards another but as a
relationship: the distinction between your interests and mine genuinely
disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc.,
and my merely having a certain attitude towards you is not enough for love.
This provides content to the notion of a “we” as the (metaphorical?)
subject of these shared cares and concerns, and as that for whose sake we act.
Solomon
(1988) offers a union view as well, though one that tries “to make new sense
out of ‘love’ through a literal rather than metaphoric sense of the
‘fusion’ of two souls” (p. 24, cf. Solomon 1981; however, it is unclear
exactly what he means by a “soul” here and so how love can be a
“literal” fusion of two souls). What Solomon has in mind is the way in
which, through love, the lovers redefine their identities as persons in terms
of the relationship: “Love is the concentration and the intensive focus of
mutual definition on a single individual, subjecting virtually every personal
aspect of one's self to this process” (1988, p. 197). The result is that
lovers come to share the interests, roles, virtues, and so on that constitute
what formerly was two individual identities but now has become a shared
identity, and they do so in part by each allowing the other to play an
important role in defining his own identity.
Nozick
(1989) offers a union view that differs from those of Scruton, Fisher, and
Solomon in that Nozick thinks that what is necessary for love is merely the desire
to form a “we,” together with the desire that your beloved reciprocates.
Nonetheless, he claims that this “we” is “a new entity in the
world…created by a new web of relationships between [the lovers] which makes
them no longer separate” a joint pool” . In addition, Nozick claims, the
lovers each acquire a new identity as a part of the “we,” a new identity
constituted by their (a) wanting to be perceived publicly as a couple, (b)
their attending to their pooled well-being, and (c) their accepting a
“certain kind of division of labor” :
A
person in a we might find
himself coming across something interesting to read yet leaving it for the
other person, not because he himself would not be interested in it but because
the other would be more interested, and one of them reading it is sufficient
for it to be registered by the wider identity now shared, the we
Opponents
of the union view have seized on claims like this as excessive: union
theorists, they claim, take too literally the ontological commitments of this
notion of a “we.” This leads to two specific criticisms of the union view.
The first is that union views do away with individual autonomy. Autonomy, it
seems, involves a kind of independence on the part of the autonomous agent,
such that she is in control over not only what she does but also who she is,
as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns, etc. However, union
views, by doing away with a clear distinction between your interests and mine,
thereby undermine this sort of independence and so undermine the autonomy of
the lovers. If autonomy is a part of the individual's good, then, on the union
view, love is to this extent bad; so much the worse for the union view (Singer
1994; Soble 1997). Moreover, Singer (1994) argues that a necessary part of
having your beloved be the object of your love is respect for your beloved as
the particular person she is, and this requires respecting her autonomy.
Union
theorists have responded to this objection in several ways. Nozick (1989)
seems to think of a loss of autonomy in love as a desirable feature of the
sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990), somewhat more reluctantly,
claims that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love.
Yet without further argument these claims seem like mere bullet biting.
Solomon describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the
paradox of love.” However, this a view that Soble
derides: merely to call it a paradox, as Solomon does, is not to face
up to the problem.
The
second criticism involves a substantive view concerning love. Part of what it
is to love someone, these opponents say, is to have concern for him for his
sake. However, union views make such concern unintelligible and eliminate the
possibility of both selfishness and self-sacrifice, for by doing away with the
distinction between my interests and your interests they have in effect turned
your interests into mine and vice versa
. Some advocates of union views see this as a point in their favor: we need to
explain how it is I can have concern for people other than myself, and the
union view apparently does this by understanding your interests to be part of
my own.
Although
Whiting's and Soble's criticisms here succeed against the more radical
advocates of the union view, they in part fail to acknowledge the kernel of
truth to be gleaned from the idea of union. Whiting's way of formulating the
second objection in terms of an unnecessary egoism in part points to a way
out: we persons are in part social creatures, and love is one profound mode of
that sociality. Indeed, part of the point of union accounts is to make sense
of this social dimension: to make sense of a way in which we can sometimes
identify ourselves with others not merely in becoming interdependent with them
(as Singer suggests, understanding ‘interdependence’ to be a kind of
reciprocal benevolence and respect) but rather in making who we are as persons
be constituted in part by those we love
Along
these lines, Friedman (1998), taking her inspiration in part from Delaney
(1996), argues that we should understand the sort of union at issue in love to
be a kind of federation of
selves:
On
the federation model, a third unified entity is constituted by the interaction
of the lovers, one which involves the lovers acting in concert across a range
of conditions and for a range of purposes. This concerted action, however,
does not erase the existence of the two lovers as separable and separate
agents with continuing possibilities for the exercise of their own respective
agencies. [p. 165]
Given
that on this view the lovers do not give up their individual identities, there
is no principled reason why the union view cannot make sense of the lover's
concern for her beloved for his sake] Moreover, Friedman argues,
once we construe union as federation, we can see that autonomy is not a
zero-sum game; rather, love can both directly enhance the autonomy of each and
promote the growth of various skills, like realistic and critical
self-evaluation, that foster autonomy.
As
this criticism of the union view indicates, many find caring about your
beloved for her sake to be a part of what it is to love her. The robust
concern view of love takes this to be the central and defining feature of
love. As Taylor puts it:
To
summarize: if x loves y
then x wants to benefit and
be with y etc., and he has
these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y
has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it
worth while to benefit and be with y.
He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means towards
some other end. [p. 157]
In
conceiving of my love for you as constituted by my concern for you for your
sake, the robust concern view rejects the idea, central to the union view,
that love is to be understood in terms of the (literal or metaphorical)
creation of a “we”: this concern for you is fundamentally my
concern, even if it is for your sake and so not egoistic]
At
the heart of the robust concern view is the idea that love “is neither
affective nor cognitive. It is volitional” (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129).
Frankfurt continues:
That
a person cares about or that he loves something has less to do with how things
make him feel, or with his opinions about them, than with the more or less
stable motivational structures that shape his preferences and that guide and
limit his conduct.
This
account analyzes caring about someone for her sake as a matter of being
motivated in certain ways, in part as a response to what happens to one's
beloved. Of course, to understand love in terms of desires is not to leave
other emotional responses out in the cold, for these emotions should be
understood as consequences of desires. Thus, just as I can be emotionally
crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed, so too I can be
emotionally crushed when things similarly go badly for my beloved. In this way
Frankfurt (1999) tacitly, and White (2001) more explicitly, acknowledge the
way in which my caring for my beloved for her sake results in my identity
being transformed through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to
things that happen to her.
Critics
of the robust concern view worry that it offers too thin a conception of love
because, by emphasizing robust concern, it understands other features we think
characteristic of love, such as one's emotional responsiveness to one's
beloved, to be the effects of
that concern rather than constituents of it. Thus Velleman (1999) argues that
robust concern views, by understanding love merely as a matter of aiming at a
particular end (viz., the welfare of one's beloved), understand love to be
merely conative. However, he claims, love can have nothing to do with desires,
offering as a counterexample the possibility of loving a troublemaking
relation whom you do not want to be with, whose well being you do not want to
promote, etc. Similarly, Badhwar (2003) argues that such a “teleological”
view of love makes it mysterious how “we can continue to love someone long
after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46). Moreover Badhwar
argues, if love is essentially a desire, then it implies that we lack
something; yet love does not imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly
at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in nothing.
Consequently, Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire
or concern for the well-being of one's beloved.
This
conclusion, however, seems too hasty, for such examples can be accommodated
within the robust concern view. Thus, the concern for your relative in
Velleman's example can be understood to be present but swamped by other, more
powerful desires to avoid him. Indeed, keeping the idea that you want to some
degree to benefit him, an idea Velleman rejects, seems to be essential to
understanding the conceptual tension between loving someone and not wanting to
help him, a tension Velleman does not fully acknowledge. Similarly, continued
love for someone who has died can be understood on the robust concern view as
parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your
desires to benefit him get transformed, through your subsequent understanding
of the impossibility of doing so, into wishes Finally, the idea of concern for
your beloved's well-being need not imply the idea that you lack something, for
such concern can be understood in terms of the disposition to be vigilant for
occasions when you can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant
occurrent desires. All of this seems fully compatible with the robust concern
view.
A
third kind of view of love understands love to be a distinctive mode of
valuing a person. As the distinction between eros
and agape
indicates, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of
whether the lover values the beloved because she is valuable, or whether the
beloved comes to be valuable to the lover as a result of her loving him.
Velleman
(1999) offers an appraisal view of love, understanding love to be
fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to
the value of the beloved. Understanding this more fully requires understanding
both the kind of value of the beloved to which one responds and the
distinctive kind of response to such value that love is. Nonetheless, it
should be clear that what makes an account be an appraisal view of love is not
the mere fact that love is understood to involve appraisal; many other
accounts do so, and it is typical of robust concern accounts, for example
In
articulating the kind of value love involves, Velleman, following Kant,
distinguishes dignity from price. To have a price,
as the economic metaphor suggests, is to have a value that can be compared to
the value of other things with prices, such that it is intelligible to
exchange without loss items of the same value. By contrast, to have dignity
is to have a value such that comparisons of relative value become meaningless.
Material goods are normally understood to have prices, but we persons have
dignity: no substitution of one person for another can preserve exactly the
same value, for something of incomparable worth would be lost (and gained) in
such a substitution.
On
this Kantian view, our dignity as persons consists in our rational nature: our
capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves
in setting our own ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values
we discover in the world. Consequently, one important way in which we exercise
our rational natures is to respond with respect to the dignity of other
persons (a dignity that consists in part in their capacity for respect): respect
just is the required minimal response to the dignity of persons. What makes a
response to a person be that of respect, Velleman claims, still following
Kant, is that it “arrests our self-love” and thereby prevents us from
treating him as a means to our ends.
Given
this, Velleman claims that love is similarly a response to the dignity of
persons, and as such it is the dignity of the object of our love that
justifies that love. However, love and respect are different kinds of
responses to the same value.
This
means that the concern, attraction, sympathy, etc. that we normally associate
with love are not constituents of love but are rather its normal effects, and
love can remain without them (as in the case of the love for a meddlesome
relative one cannot stand being around). Moreover, this provides Velleman with
a clear account of the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a
response to persons as such, and to say that you love your dog is therefore to
be confused.
Of
course, we do not respond with love to the dignity of every person we meet,
nor are we somehow required to: love, as the disarming of our emotional
defenses in a way that makes us especially vulnerable to another, is the
optional maximal response to others’ dignity. What, then, explains the
selectivity of love—why I love some people and not others? The answer lies
in the contingent fit between the way some people behaviorally express their
dignity as persons and the way I happen to respond to those expressions by
becoming emotionally vulnerable to them. The right sort of fit makes someone
“lovable” by me, and my responding with love in these cases is a matter of
my “really seeing” this person in a way that I fail to do with others who
do not fit with me in this way. By ‘lovable’ here Velleman seems to mean able
to be loved, not worthy of
being loved, for nothing Velleman says here speaks to a question about the
justification of my loving this person rather than that. Rather, what he
offers is an explanation of
the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my
response be that of love rather than mere respect.
This
understanding of the selectivity of love as something that can be explained
but not justified is potentially troubling. For we ordinarily think we can
justify not only my loving you rather than someone else but also and more
importantly the constancy of my love: my continuing to love you even as you
change in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347)
puts the worry about constancy:
while
you seem to want it to be true that, were you to become a schmuck, your lover
would continue to love you,…you also want it to be the case that your lover
would never love a schmuck.
The
issue here is not merely that we can offer explanations of the selectivity of
my love, of why I do not love schmucks; rather, at issue is the discernment
of love, of loving and continuing to love for good reasons as well as of
ceasing to love for good reasons. To have these good reasons seems to involve
attributing different values to you now rather than formerly or rather than to
someone else, yet this is precisely what Velleman denies is the case in making
the distinction between love and respect the way he does.
It
is also questionable whether Velleman can even explain the selectivity of love
in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities. For
the relevant sensitivities on my part are emotional sensitivities: the
lowering of my emotional defenses and so becoming emotionally vulnerable to
you. Thus, I become vulnerable to the harms (or goods) that befall you and so
sympathetically feel your pain (or joy). Such emotions are themselves
assessable for warrant, and now we can ask why my disappointment that you lost
the race is warranted, but my being disappointed that a mere stranger lost
would not be warranted. The intuitive answer is that I love you but not him.
However, this answer is unavailable to Velleman, because he thinks that what
makes my response to your dignity that of love rather than respect is
precisely that I feel such emotions, and to appeal to my love in explaining
the emotions therefore seems viciously circular.
In
contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994) understands love to be fundamentally
a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. To bestow
value on another is to project a kind of intrinsic value onto him. Indeed,
this fact about love is supposed to distinguish love from liking: “Love is
an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently
teleological . As such, there are no standards of correctness for bestowing
such value, and this is how love differs from other personal attitudes like
gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no
matter what the object is
worth” . Consequently, Singer thinks, love is not an attitude that can be
justified in any way.
What
is it, exactly, to bestow this kind of value on someone? It is, Singer says, a
kind of attachment and commitment to the beloved, in which one comes to treat
him as an end in himself and so to respond to his ends, interests, concerns,
etc. as having value for their own sake. This means in part that the bestowal
of value reveals itself “by caring about the needs and interests of the
beloved, by wishing to benefit or protect her, by delighting in her
achievements,” etc. This sounds very much like the robust concern view, yet
the bestowal view differs in understanding such robust concern to be the effect
of the bestowal of value that is love rather than itself what constitutes
love: in bestowing value on my beloved, I make him be valuable in such a way
that I ought to respond with robust concern.
For
it to be intelligible that I have bestowed value on someone, I must therefore
respond appropriately to him as valuable, and this requires having some sense
of what his well-being is and of what affects that well-being positively or
negatively. Yet having this sense requires in turn knowing what his strengths
and deficiencies are, and this is a matter of appraising him in various ways.
Bestowal thus presupposes a kind of appraisal, as a way of “really seeing”
the beloved and attending to him. Nonetheless, Singer claims, it is the
bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the
appraisal is required only so that the commitment to one's beloved and his
value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission
to some unknown being.
Singer
is walking a tightrope in trying to make room for appraisal in his account of
love. Insofar as the account is fundamentally a bestowal account, Singer
claims that love cannot be justified, that we bestow the relevant kind of
value “gratuitously.” This suggests that love is blind, that it does not
matter what our beloved is like, which seems patently false. Singer tries to
avoid this conclusion by appealing to the role of appraisal: it is only
because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come
to bestow value on him. Yet the “because” here, since it cannot justify
the bestowal, is at best a kind of contingent causal explanation. In this
respect, Singer's account of the selectivity of love is much the same as
Velleman's, and it is liable to the same criticism: it makes unintelligible
the way in which our love can be discerning for better or worse reasons.
Indeed, this failure to make sense of the idea that love can be justified is a
problem for any bestowal view. For either (a) a bestowal itself cannot be
justified (as on Singer's account), in which case the justification of love is
impossible, or (b) a bestowal can be justified, in which case it is hard to
make sense of value as being bestowed rather than there antecedently in the
object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”
Given
these problems with the accounts of love as valuing, perhaps we should turn to
the emotions. For emotions just are responses to objects that combine
evaluation, motivation, and a kind of phenomenology, all central features of
the attitude of love.
Thus,
Hamlyn (1989, p. 219) says:
It
would not be a plausible move to defend any theory of the emotions to which
love and hate seemed exceptions by saying that love and hate are after all not
emotions. I have heard this said, but it does seem to me a desperate move to
make. If love and hate are not emotions what is?
The
difficulty with this claim, as Rorty (1980) argues, is that the word,
‘emotion,’ does not seem to pick out a homogeneous collection of mental
states, and so various theories claiming that love is an emotion mean very
different things. Consequently, what are here labeled “emotion views” are
divided into those that understand love to be a particular kind of
evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object, whether that response is
merely occurrent or dispositional (‘emotions proper,’ and those that
understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions
proper
An
emotion proper is a kind of
“evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”; what does this mean?
Emotions are generally understood to have several objects. The target
of an emotion is that at which the emotion is directed: if I am afraid or
angry at you, then you are the target. In responding to you with fear or
anger, I am implicitly evaluating you in a particular way, and this
evaluation—called the formal object—is
the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular
emotion type. Thus, in fearing you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow
dangerous, whereas in being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow
offensive. Yet emotions are not merely evaluations of their targets; they in
part motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by motivating
action to avoid the danger) and arationally (via certain characteristic
expressions, such as slamming a door out of anger). Moreover, emotions are
generally understood to involve a phenomenological component, though just how
to understand the characteristic “feel” of an emotion and its relation to
the evaluation and motivation is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are
typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel imposed on us as
if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do.
What
then are we saying when we say that love is an emotion proper? According to
Brown (1987, p. 14), emotions as occurrent mental states are “abnormal
bodily changes caused by the agent's evaluation or appraisal of some object or
situation that the agent believes to be of concern to him or her.” He cashes
this out by saying that in love, we “cherish” the person for having “a
particular complex of instantiated qualities” that is “open-ended” so
that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time . These
qualities, which include historical and relational qualities, are evaluated in
love as worthwhile] All of this seems aimed at cashing out what
love's formal object is, a task that is fundamental to understanding love as
an emotion proper. Thus, Brown seems to say that love's formal object is just
being worthwhile (or, given his examples, perhaps: worthwhile as a person),
and he resists being any more specific than this in order to preserve the
open-endedness of love. Hamlyn (1989) offers a similar account, saying
With
love the difficulty is to find anything of this kind [i.e., a formal object]
which is uniquely appropriate to love. My thesis is that there is nothing of
this kind that must be so, and that this differentiates it and hate from the
other emotions.
Hamlyn
goes on to suggest that love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of
positive or negative “feeling towards,” presupposed by all other emotions
The
trouble with these accounts of love as an emotion proper is that they provide
too thin a conception of love. In Hamlyn's case, love is conceived as a fairly
generic pro-attitude, rather than as the specific kind of distinctively personal
attitude discussed here. In Brown's case, cashing out the formal object of
love as simply being worthwhile (as a person) fails to distinguish love from
other evaluative responses like admiration and respect. Part of the problem
seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and
Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the
understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to
accommodate love. Yet it is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion
proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so.
The
emotion complex view, which understands love to be a complex emotional
attitude towards another person, may initially seem to hold out great promise
to overcome the problems of alternative types of views. By articulating the
emotional interconnections between persons, it could offer a satisfying
account of the “depth” of love without the excesses of the union view and
without the overly narrow teleological focus of the robust concern view; and
because these emotional interconnections are themselves evaluations, it could
offer an understanding of love as simultaneously evaluative, without needing
to specify a single formal object of love. However, the devil is in the
details.
Rorty
does not try to present a complete account of love; rather, she focuses
on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” which, like love,
essentially involve emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity:
“they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject
and an object” . In part this means that what makes an attitude be one of
love is not the presence of a state that we can point to at a particular time
within the lover; rather, love is to be “identified by a characteristic
narrative history” . Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love
involves the lover's being permanently transformed by loving who he does.
To
a certain extent, such emotional interdependence involves feeling sympathetic
emotions, so that, for example, I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf
of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds. However, Baier
insists, love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a
sympathetic echo in the other” ; the emotional interdependence of the lovers
involves also appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of
your beloved. Two examples Baier gives are
a feeling of “mischievous delight” at your beloved's temporary bafflement,
and amusement at her embarrassment. The idea is that in a loving relationship
your beloved gives you permission to feel such emotions when no one else is
permitted to do so, and a condition of her granting you that permission is
that you feel these emotions “tenderly.” Moreover, you ought to respond
emotionally to your beloved's emotional responses to you: by feeling hurt when
she is indifferent to you, for example. All of these foster the sort of
emotional interdependence Baier is after—a kind of intimacy you have with
your beloved.
Badhwar
similarly understands love to be a matter of “one's overall emotional
orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and
feelings”; as such, love is a matter of having a certain “character
structure.” Central to this complex emotional orientation, Badhwar thinks,
is what she calls the “look of love”: “an ongoing [emotional]
affirmation of the loved object as worthy of existence…for her own sake”
(p. 44), an affirmation that involves taking pleasure in your beloved's
well-being. Moreover, Badhwar claims, the look of love also provides to the
beloved reliable testimony concerning the quality of the beloved's character
and actions .
There
is surely something very right about the idea that love, as an attitude
central to deeply personal relationships, should not be understood as a state
that can simply come and go. Rather, as the emotion complex view insists, the
complexity of love is to be found in the historical patterns of one's
emotional responsiveness to one's beloved—a pattern that also projects into
the future. Indeed, as suggested above, the kind of emotional interdependence
that results from this complex pattern can seem to account for the intuitive
“depth” of love as fully interwoven into one's emotional sense of oneself.
And it seems to make some headway in understanding the complex phenomenology
of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure in the presence of
one's beloved, yet it can at other times involve frustration, exasperation,
anger, and hurt as a manifestation of the complexities and depth of the
relationships it fosters.
Nonetheless,
some questions remain. If love is to be understood as an emotion complex, we
need a much more explicit account of the pattern at issue here: what ties all
of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? Baier
and Badhwar seem content to provide interesting and insightful examples of
this pattern, but that does not seem to be enough. For example, what connects
my amusement at my beloved's embarrassment to other emotions like my joy on
his behalf when he succeeds? Why shouldn’t my amusement at his embarrassment
be understood instead as a somewhat cruel case of schadenfreude
and so as antithetical to, and disconnected from, love?
Presumably
the answer requires returning to the historicity of love: it all depends on
the historical details of the relationship my beloved and I have forged. Some
loves develop so that the intimacy within the relationship is such as to allow
for tender, teasing responses to each other, whereas other loves may not. The
historical details, together with the lovers’ understanding of their
relationship, presumably determine which emotional responses belong to the
pattern constitutive of love and which do not. However, this answer so far is
inadequate: not just any historical relationship involving emotional
interdependence is a loving relationship, and we need a principled way of
distinguishing loving relationships from other relational evaluative
attitudes: precisely what is the characteristic narrative history that is
characteristic of love? Again, proponents of the emotion complex view need to
provide a clearer, principled account of the relevant kind of pattern of
emotional responses constitutive of love.
Why
do we love? It has been suggested above that any account of love needs to be
able to answer some such justificatory question. Although the issue of the
justification of love is important on its own, it is also important for the
implications it has for understanding more clearly the precise object of love:
how can we make sense of the intuitions not only that we love the individuals
themselves rather than their properties, but also that my beloved is not
fungible—that no one could simply take her place without loss. Different
theories approach these questions in different ways, but, as will become clear
below, the question of justification is primary.
One
way to understand the question of why we love is as asking for what the value
of love is: what do we get out of it? One kind of answer, which has its roots
in Aristotle, is that having loving relationships promotes self-knowledge
insofar as your beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting your character
back to you (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). Of course, this answer presupposes that we
cannot accurately know ourselves in other ways: that left alone, our sense of
ourselves will be too imperfect, too biased, to help us grow and mature as
persons. The metaphor of a mirror also suggests that our beloveds will be in
the relevant respects similar to us, so that merely by observing them, we can
come to know ourselves better in a way that is, if not free from bias, at
least more objective than otherwise.
Brink
argues that there are serious limits to the value of such mirroring of
one's self in a beloved. For if the aim is not just to know yourself better
but to improve yourself, you
ought also to interact with others who are not just like yourself: interacting
with such diverse others can help you recognize alternative possibilities for
how to live and so better assess the relative merits of these possibilities.
Nonetheless, we need not take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally;
rather, our beloveds can reflect our selves not through their inherent
similarity to us but rather through the interpretations they offer of us, both
explicitly and implicitly in their responses to us. This is what Badhwar calls
the “epistemic significance” of love
In
addition to this epistemic significance of love, LaFollette offers several
other reasons why it is good to love, reasons derived in part from the
psychological literature on love: love increases our sense of well-being, it
elevates our sense of self-worth, and it serves to develop our character. It
also, we might add, tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase
health and longevity. Friedman argues
that the kind of partiality towards our beloveds that love involves is itself morally
valuable because it supports relationships—loving relationships—that
contribute “to human well-being, integrity, and fulfillment in life” . And
Solomon claims:
Ultimately,
there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we
bring out the best in each other.” What counts as “the best,” of course,
is subject to much individual variation.
This
is because, Solomon suggests, in loving someone, I want myself to be better so
as to be worthy of his love for me.
Each
of these answers to the question of why we love understands it to be asking
about love quite generally, abstracted away from details of particular
relationships. It is also possible to understand the question as asking about
particular loves. Here, there are several questions that are relevant:
These
are importantly different questions. Velleman , for example, thinks we can
answer (1) by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a
rational nature, yet he thinks (2) and (3) have no answers: the best we can do
is offer causal explanations for our loving particular people.
It
is important not to misconstrue these justificatory questions. Thomas , for
example, rejects the idea that love can be justified: “there are no rational
considerations whereby anyone can lay claim to another's love or insist that
an individual's love for another is irrational” . This is because, Thomas
claims :
no
matter how wonderful and lovely an individual might be, on any and all
accounts, it is simply false that a romantically unencumbered person must love
that individual on pain of being irrational. Or, there is no irrationality
involved in ceasing to love a person whom one once loved immensely, although
the person has not changed.
However,
as LaFollette correctly points out,
reason
is not some external power which dictates how we should behave, but an
internal power, integral to who we are.…Reason does not command that we love
anyone. Nonetheless, reason is vital in determining whom we love and why we
love them.
That
is, reasons for love are pro tanto:
they are a part of the overall reasons we have for acting, and it is up to us
in exercising our capacity for agency to decide what on balance we have reason
to do or even whether we shall act contrary to our reasons. To construe the
notion of a reason for love as compelling us to love, as Thomas does, is to
misconstrue the place such reasons have within our agency.
The
first worry is raised by Vlastos in
a discussion Plato's and Aristotle's accounts of love. Vlastos notes that
these accounts focus on the properties
of our beloveds: we are to love people, they say, only because and insofar as
they are objectifications of the excellences. Consequently, he argues, in
doing so they fail to distinguish “disinterested
affection for the person we
love” from “appreciation of the
excellences instantiated by that person”
. That is, Vlastos thinks that Plato and Aristotle provide an account of love
that is really a love of properties rather than a love of persons—love of a type
of person, rather than love of a particular person—thereby losing what is
distinctive about love as an essentially personal
attitude. This worry about Plato and Aristotle might seem to apply just as
well to other accounts that justify love in terms of the properties of the
person: insofar as we love the person for the sake of her properties, it might
seem that what we love is those properties and not the person. Here it is
surely insufficient to say, as Solomon does,
“if love has its reasons, then it is not the whole person that one loves but
certain aspects of that person—though the rest of the person comes along
too, of course”: that final tagline fails to address the central difficulty
about what the object of love is and so about love as a distinctly personal
attitude.
The
second worry concerns the fungibility of the object of love. To be fungible
is to be replaceable by another relevantly similar object without any loss of
value. Thus, money is fungible: I can give you two $5 bills in exchange for a
$10 bill, and neither of us has lost anything. Is the object of love fungible?
That is, can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another
relevantly similar person without any loss? The worry about fungibility is
commonly put this way: if we accept that love can be justified by appealing to
properties of the beloved, then it may seem that in loving someone for certain
reasons, I love him not simply as the individual he is, but as instantiating
those properties. And this may imply that any other person instantiating those
same properties would do just as well: my beloved would be fungible. Indeed,
it may be that another person exhibits the properties that ground my love to a
greater degree than my current beloved does, and so it may seem that in such a
case I have reason to “trade up”—to switch my love to the new, better
person. However, it seems clear that the objects of our loves are not
fungible: love seems to involve a deeply personal commitment to a particular
person, a commitment that is antithetical to the idea that our beloveds are
fungible or to the idea that we ought to be willing to trade up when possible.
In
responding to these worries, Nozick (1989) appeals to the union view of love
he endorses
The
intention in love is to form a we
and to identify with it as an extended self, to identify one's fortunes in
large part with its fortunes. A willingness to trade up, to destroy the very we
you largely identify with, would then be a willingness to destroy your self in
the form of your own extended self.
So
it is because love involves forming a “we” that we must understand other
persons and not properties to be the objects of love, and it is because my
very identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” that it is not
possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another.
However, Badhwar criticizes
Nozick, saying that his response implies that once I love someone, I cannot
abandon that love no matter who that person becomes; this, she says, “cannot
be understood as love at all rather than addiction”
Instead,
Badhwar turns to her
robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his
sake rather than one's own. Insofar as my love is disinterested
— not a means to antecedent ends of my own—it would be senseless to think
that my beloved could be replaced by someone who is able to satisfy my ends
equally well or better. Consequently, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable.
However, this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as
Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. For the concern over fungibility arises
not merely for those cases in which we think of love as justified
instrumentally, but also for those cases in which the love is justified by the
intrinsic value of the properties of my beloved. Confronted with cases like
this, Badhwar concludes that the
object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very
unlikely in practice
Nonetheless,
Badhwar thinks that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible.
By this she means that we experience
our beloveds to be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are
not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” . Love
can be such that we sometimes desire to be with this particular person whom we
love, not another whom we also love, for our loves are qualitatively
different. But why is this? It seems as though the typical reason I now want
to spend time with Amy rather than Bob is, for example, that Amy is funny but
Bob is not. I love Amy in part for her humor, and I love Bob for other
reasons, and these qualitative differences between them is what makes them not
fungible. However, this reply does not address the worry about the possibility
of trading up: if Bob were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as
Amy, why shouldn’t I dump her and spend all my time with him?
A
somewhat different approach is taken by Whiting (1991). In response to the
first worry concerning the object of love, Whiting argues that Vlastos offers
a false dichotomy: having disinterested
affection for someone—for her sake rather than my own—essentially involves
an appreciation of her excellences as such. Indeed, Whiting says, my
appreciation of these as excellences, and so the underlying commitment I have
to their value, just is a
disinterested commitment to her because these excellences constitute her
identity as the person she is. The person, therefore, really is the object of
love. Delaney (1996) takes the complementary tack of distinguishing between
the object of one's love,
which of course is the person, and the grounds
of the love, which are her properties: to say, as Solomon does, that we love
someone for reasons is not at all to say that we only love certain aspects of
the person. Thus, Whiting's rejection of Vlastos’ dichotomy can be read as
saying that what makes my attitude be one of disinterested
affection—one of love—for the person is precisely that I am thereby
responding to her excellences as the reasons for that affection]
Of
course, more needs to be said about what it is that makes a particular person
be the object of love. Implicit in Whiting's account is an understanding of
the way in which the object of my love is determined in part by the history of
interactions I have with her: it is she, and not merely her properties (which
might be instantiated in many different people), that I want to be with, it is
she, and not merely her properties, on whose behalf I am concerned when she
suffers and whom I seek to comfort, etc. This addresses the first worry, but
not the second worry about fungibility, for the question still remains whether
she is the object of my love only as instantiating certain properties, and so
whether or not I have reason to “trade up.”
To
respond to the fungibility worry, Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the
historical relationship. Thus, Whiting claims, although there may be a
relatively large pool of people who have the kind of excellences of character
that would justify my loving them, and so although there can be no answer to
question about why I come to love this rather than that person within this
pool, once I have come to love this person and so have developed a historical
relation with her, this history of concern justifies my continuing to love
this person rather than someone else (1991, p. 7). Similarly, Delaney claims
that love is grounded in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p.
346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love this person rather than
switching allegiances and loving someone else. In each case, the appeal to
both such historical relations and the excellences of character of my friend
is intended to provide an answer to question and this explains why the objects
of love are not fungible.
There
seems to be something very much right with this response. Relationships
grounded in love are essentially personal, and it would be odd to think of
what justifies that love to be merely non-relational properties of the
beloved. Nonetheless, it is still unclear how the historical-relational
propreties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern
beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to question 1 by appeal to
the excellences of the beloved's character (cf. Brink 1999). The mere fact
that I have loved her in the past does not seem to justify
my continuing to love her in the future. When we imagine that she is going
through a rough time and begins to lose the virtues justifying my initial love
for her, why shouldn’t I dump her and instead come to love someone new
having all of those virtues more fully? Intuitively (unless the change she
undergoes makes her in some important sense no longer the same person she
was), we think I should not dump her, but the appeal to the mere fact that I
loved her in the past is surely not enough. Yet what historical-relational
properties could do the trick? (For an interesting attempt at an answer, see
Kolodny 2003.)
In
part the trouble here arises from tacit preconceptions concerning the nature
of justification. If we attempt to justify a love in terms of particular
historical facts about the relationship, then it seems like we are appealing
to merely idiosyncratic and subjective properties, which might explain but
cannot justify love. This seems to imply that justification in general
requires the appeal to general, objective properties that others might
share, which leads to the problem of fungibility. Solving the problem, it
might therefore seem, requires somehow overcoming this preconception
concerning justification—a task which no one has attempted in the
literature on love.
******************************************************************************************************************************************************************
After
all that theorizing do we need some more words to express the varieties of
love – heres one suggestion ….
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limerence
Limerence
Limerence
is a state of mind that, in standard English, is often referred to either as
"being in love" (as distinct from "loving" someone) or as
infatuation. The term "infatuation" carries connotations of
immaturity or fatuousness, while "limerence" is intended to separate
these connotations from the emotion. However, this intended separation does
not, by itself, mean that the two are fully separable. Also, to the extent
that its usage has carried over from pop psychology to non-technical usage,
its meaning seems to lose the intended precision so that it becomes a mere
substitute for either "(sexual) attraction" or
"infatuation".The word "limerence" was coined by Dorothy
Tennov while a professor of psychology at the University of Bridgeport,
Connecticut around 1977, and first published in her 1979 book Love and
Limerence: The Experience of Being
in
Love.
"Limerent"
is the subjective noun (the limerent person) as well as the adjective form (so
the "limerent object" is the person the limerent desires). The
coinages are arbitrary; there is no specific etymology. The word is not found
in current dictionaries, but is nevertheless in use by
psychologists
and by others discussing romantic relationships."Limerence" is
distinguished from "love" in that love (in most of its meanings)
involves concern for the loved one's welfare and feelings and not necessarily
any expectation of gain in return. In contrast, limerence demands
reciprocation. Despite limerence's interrelation with sexual attraction, it is
differentiated from purely sexual desire in that the sought after
reciprocation comes in the form of returned limerent feelings; the desire for
sexual relations is usually present but not a necessity.Also in distinction
from love, limerence tends to be comparatively short-lived. It can last up to
one and a half years or so, but typically lasts only a few months. Either
reciprocation occurs and limerence is
replaced
by other feelings (possibly lasting love), evidence that the limerent object
does not reciprocate finally overwhelms the limerent's passion, or the
limerence expires or is transferred to a new object.The primary
characteristics of limerence can be summarized as intrusive,perhaps obsessive
thinking about the limerent object and acute longing for reciprocation.
Clinically, this state is marked by an increase in emotional sensitivity and
instability. People can sometimes become very irrational, or almost insane. In
particular, the desire for reciprocation can produce
irrational
beliefs ("she only had me arrested because her love is too strong for her
to stand") and behavior ("if I give her gifts I can't afford she
will see how much I love her").
Limerents
often feel real physiological effects, including a physical pain in the chest
("heartache") when reciprocation seems unlikely, and euphoria when
reciprocation seems evident. If the limerent object does not reciprocate and
does not handle the situation with care, people in this state can suffer
severe depression, sometimes committing suicide - unrequited love is one of
the major causes of suicide in the younger population.[citation needed]An
infatuated person has an idealized image of their target. The person
"fell in love" with this image, which may have no relation to the
real person whatsoever. The object of infatuation is likely to reject the
advances of the afflicted person, because they may consciously or
unconsciously realize that the afflicted is in love with a fictional image,
not them, and that they are not compatible despite the afflicted one's
daydreams. Alternately, the afflicted may get to know the person well enough
to realize that they are in love with a fiction, and become disillusioned. A
happy ending is also possible: if the daydream image actually resembles the
real person closely enough, that might be referred to as "love at first
sight". "True love" must involve an understanding of a person
on a fundamental level, which is unlikely to reside in the fantasy of a crush
unless one postulates an empathic connection or accepts Plato's concept of
God-given right opinion.
***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
Then
of course as any ecstacy user will tell you it’s very much a matter of
chemistry….
http://iserver.saddleback.cc.ca.us/faculty/jfritsen/articles.html
The
Science Of Love (the chemistry of romance)
ABSTRACT:
Researchers believe that love at first sight is not just a cliche. A chemical reaction which may lead to romance can be created when one person first looks at another. A mix of natural chemicals and hormones may explain why opposites attract, mismatched couples success and some couples survive the worst situations.
TEXT:
The
couples on the following pages prove what researchers now know:
Romance, quite literally, requires a certain chemistry.
Love at first sight is no apocryphal cliche. Writer Nuna Alberts
reports that researchers now know why one glimpse of the right person can let
off a chemical reaction leading to romance. But what happens after what? Why
do some relationships succeed while others fizzle? That may be more magic than
science. Claudia Glenn Dowling visits with 10 famous couples who have overcome
time and trials: depression, the death of a child, cancer, the stress of
public life. Through it all, their marriages have survived--even grown
stronger. "Need is
the
thing that holds a marriage together over the long haul," says actor
Carroll O'Connor. "If the need stops, the marriage
stops."Thirty-one-year-old Dana Commandatore claims she has never been
the kind of woman men immediately notice. But one night last year, while at a
singles
bar
with friends, she couldn't keep the opposite sex away. "Guys were coming
up to me and getting very close, and I was like, 'Wow!'"The New York City
office manager, now in a committed relationship with one of the men she met
that night, credits her ability to attract him that evening to a costly potion
($60 for a tenth of an ounce) called Falling in Love.
Its manufacturer, hilosophy cosmetics, claims the concoction is laced
with pheromones, those odorless airborne molecules, synthesized from human
chemical secretions, that are purported to boost attractiveness. (And
yes,
it's available at a department store near you.)Bunk? Sniff if you will. Many
do. But whether one believes Commandatore is hopelessly susceptible or
remarkably savvy, one thing is clear:
New
research in the field of love and attraction shows that romance--long the
domain of poets, philosophers and five-hankie movies--may be ruled as much by
molecules as it is by emotion. In fact, scientists now believe that the
impulse that drives us to mate, marry and remain monogamous is not a result of
mere social convention: It is also a complex mix of naturally occurring
chemicals and hormones--Cupid's elixirs, if you will--that helps guide us
through life's most important decision. That physiological component, say the
researchers, may help explain some of love's mysteries: why opposites attract,
why so many seemingly mismatched couples succeed, why we stick together with
partners through even the worst of times."When you fall in love or in
lust, it isn't merely an emotional event," says Theresa Crenshaw, M.D.,
the Masters and Johnson-trained author of The Alchemy of Love and Lust.
"Your body's hormones, each with unique contributions, get involved
too."Free will, of course, can't be discounted. If you like redheads, you
like redheads. If you're a sucker for a beautiful voice, the man who croons
"Night and Day" to you has an edge.
But
doctors have long known that even that most primal of impulses, lust--the
feeling that propels the lonely out the door in search of love--has a chemical
basis. It is testosterone, the hormone that creates basic sexual desire in men
and women.Researchers are now concentrating on what happens after one walks
out the door and into a wide world of romantic opportunity. What physical
attributes, outside the obvious, attract? What role do pheromones play?
When do other, more potent brain chemicals begin to kick in? The last
decade's discoveries in neuroscience let researchers predict--even, for the
first time, control, albeit in a limited way--what was once thought
uncontrollable: love. "We are at the dawn of a new beginning, where
people may soon never have to suffer the pain of love's slings and
arrows," such as rejection, difficulty in bonding and attachment
disorders, says James H. Fallon, professor of anatomy and neurobiology at the
University of California, Irvine, College of Medicine. In 10 years, maybe
less, he says, there could be brain chemical nasal sprays to enhance love
between a couple. "We're very close. And that's not just happy
talk...we're like giddy kids at the possibilities."Indeed, what
scientists believe they already know about matters of the heart is remarkable.
To
illustrate their findings, follow the story of Mike, a fictional Everyman, as
he falls in love. One night,
Mike, single, nervously arrives at a party, gets a drink, then scans the room.
Science tells us that, unconsciously, he is already noting the size and
symmetry of the facial bones of the women around him (a recent study by
University of New Mexico biologists found that symmetrical bone structure is
prized more than anything because it suggests a lack of undesirable genetic
mutations). He also studies the women's curves, as research shows that men
prefer waists to
be
60-80 percent the size of hips, an indicator, however crude, of health and
fertility. (Women, for their part, seek men with slightly feminized
faces--think Leonardo DiCaprio--because they appear warmer, kinder and more
trustworthy.) "Judging
beauty has a strong evolutionary component," says University of Texas at
Austin professor of psychology Devendra Singh. "You're looking at another
person and figuring out whether you want your children to carry that person's
genes."
At
the party, Mike subconsciously follows these clues and makes eye contact with
a woman, Sue. She smiles. His midbrain--the part that controls visual and
auditory reflexes--releases the eurotransmitter dopamine, a brain chemical
that gives him a rush--and the motivation to initiate conversation. As he
nears, Mike's pheromones reach Sue's hypothalamus, eliciting a "yes,
come
closer" look. Why this happens isn't clear, but one study at the
University of Bern, in Switzerland, suggests that people use smell as a
possible cue for distinguishing genetic similarity in a potential partner--a
consideration in preventing possible birth defects.Mike is now feeling the
first flutter of sexual attraction. His hypothalamus--the brain region that
triggers the chemicals responsible for emotion--tells his body to send out
attraction signals: His pupils dilate; his heart pumps harder so that his face
flushes; he sweats slightly, which gives his skin a warm glow; glands in his
scalp release oil to create extra shine. By night's end, he gets her phone
number. The next day, memories of Sue direct his brain to secrete increasing
levels of dopamine, creating
feelings
of yearning that propel him toward the phone. He calls. She sounds excited.
The dopamine released in the base of the forebrain prompts the first strong
feelings of pleasure that Mike associates with Sue.
When
they meet the next night at a restaurant, his stomach does flip-flops and he
starts feeling giddy at the sight of her. He can think of nothing but that
face, those eyes, that smile, as his brain pathways become intoxicated with
elevated levels of dopamine, norepinephrine (another neurotransmitter) and,
particularly, phenylethylamine (PEA). This cocktail of natural chemicals gives
Mike a slight buzz, as if he had taken a very low dose of amphetamines (or a
large dose of chocolate, another source of PEA). This contributes to the
almost irrational feelings of attraction--we've all felt them--that begin
dominating his thoughts at work, while he drives, as he goes to sleep.
"It's a natural high," says Anthony Walsh, professor of criminology
at Boise State University and author of The Science of Love: Understanding
Love and Its Effects on Mind and Body. "Your pupils dilate, your heart
pumps, you sweat--it's the same reaction you'd have if you were
afraid
or angry. It's the fight-or-flight mechanism, except you don't want to fight
or flee."
In
the weeks that follow, Mike and Sue's relationship deepens. The first night
Mike brings Sue home, he dims the lights and plays a little soft music. The
chemical oxytocin floods his body.
Twenty
years ago, oxytocin was considered a female hormone useful only as a trigger
for labor contractions and to induce lactation. In the '80s, research found
that it is produced in the hypothalamus by both men and women, helping to
create feelings of caring and warmth (thus bonding mother and baby after birth
and during nursing). As Sue's oxytocin also surges, the couple begin forming a
bond. Scientists now think that oxytocin actually strengthens the brain's
receptors that produce emotions. Oxytocin increases further during touching,
cuddling and other
stages
of sexual intimacy. It may also make it easier to evoke pleasant memories of
each other while apart. Mike can think of Sue and experience, in his mind, the
way she looks, feels and smells, and that will reinforce his connection to
her. (Helen Fisher, a Rutgers University anthropologist, is conducting
research with magnetic resonance imaging to track which parts of
the
brain change when someone is in love.)Next comes the wedding. Honeymoon. Now
what?
Fast-forward
18 months. At this point, Mike
and Sue could be at a crossroads. Science tells us that 18 months to three
years after the first moment of infatuation, it's not unusual for feelings of
neutrality for one's love partner to set in ("Why don't you take out the
trash?" vs. "I dream about you all the time"). For many, there
could be a chemical explanation. The mix of dopamine,
norepinephrine
and PEA is so much like a drug, say scientists, that it takes greater and
greater doses to get the same buzz. So after someone has been with one person
for a time, his brain stops reacting to the chemicals because it is
habituated. "The brain can't maintain the revved-up status," says
Walsh. "As happens with any drug, it needs more and more PEA to make the
heart go pitter-patter."Couples with attachments that are shaky for other
reasons (money woes, abuse, irreconcilable differences) may part and--because
the body's tolerance for PEA soon diminishes--seek someone new with whom to
find the thrill of early love. More likely, however, committed couples will
moveon to what science suggests is the most rewarding and enduring aspect of
love.
Though
the same addictive rush isn't involved, ongoing physical contact, not just
sex, helps produce endorphins, another brain chemical, and continued high
doses of oxytocin. Endorphins calm the mind and kill anxiety. Both chemicals
are like natural opiates and help stabilize the couple by inducing what famed
obstetrician Michel Odent, of London's Primal Health Research
Center
(whose book, The Scientification of Love, will be published this year), calls
"a druglike dependency."
Even
in the animal world, neuroscientists had long wondered what kept prairie voles
loyal to one mate while their cousins, the montane voles, were promiscuous
maters. As it turned out, prairie voles are much more sensitive to the effects
of oxytocin. In experiments, when those receptors are blocked, the animals'
stay-at-home tendencies decline. "At present, our knowledge of
neuroscience is doubling every two and a half years," says Robert Friar,
professor of physiology and human sexuality at Michigan's Ferris State
University. "That means that in the last two and a half years we have
learned more than all prior humans about the workings of the brain." Says
the University of California's Fallon: "Certainly the '90s are a blur for
people in neuroscience. We all want to be up twenty-four hours a day so we
don't miss a thing."But in the end, will love's mysteries ever unravel in
a laboratory? Some, like Fallon,
say yes. Others, perhaps most of us lucky enough to have experienced true
love, might believe--and wish--otherwise. Even in this
advanced
age of science, where we can transplant organs, map the human genome and clone
our own offspring, we still have not come close to understanding what,
exactly, ignites our spark of life, our souls, our very being. Maybe,
possibly, that will remain true for the farthest reaches of
love.
*******************************************************************************************************
And
for those of you who think we are being species-ist (?):n
Unrequited love?
http://www.zoophilia.net/zoosexual.php
That
all Folks,
Colin
