Philosophical Essay on Love

Philosophical Essay on Love

How to know if it is love? A look at the most elusive concept of all

We all know, one way or another, what love is. We have all felt it or experienced its absence, and yet we cannot agree on what it is, or how it is defined or what its essential features are. Sometimes we do not even know if it is love that we feel or if it is something else, since many other emotions can be confused with love. Why is such an elusive concept so central to our existence?

If we look in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy for the word "love", we will find definitions like this: “Intense feeling of the human being who, starting from his own insufficiency, needs and seeks the encounter and union with another being ”; or like this: "Feeling towards another person that naturally attracts us and that, seeking reciprocity in the desire for union, completes us, makes us happy and gives us energy to live together, communicate and create"; or a much simpler and more concise: "Feeling of affection, inclination and giving to someone or something." They are very different definitions, but they have two things in common: 1) love is a

feeling, that is, something that you feel; and 2) love is felt for the other, that is, it is something that links us with others. We can deduce that love, in principle, is a feeling of bond with the other.

Similar conclusion it is, however, very inconclusive. Feelings, in general, always have to do with others, since we are social creatures. Both aggression and empathy play an important role in the social life of humanity and we have assigned each a place in our stories, in our imagination and in our way of understanding the complex inner world that characterizes our species.

According to science, love is the product of the action of two hormones different on the brain: oxytocin and vasopressin, produced by the hypothalamus and released by the pituitary. Both hormones are present in high amounts during the heights of romantic love, bringing a sense of well-being, satisfaction, and gratification. The objective This mechanism could well be the establishment of continuous ties in the couple, in order to provide the offspring with a greater base of support and, therefore, greater chances of life success.

This scientific explanation may be accurate, but it actually says very little about what love is. Reduce to one chemical reaction a feeling that has thousands of years been recounted, relived and trying to describe itself in poem after poem love, suffers from the same drawback as when consciousness is associated with electrical activity in the brain.

The material and organic explanation of a psychic phenomenon leaves little room to contemplate its nuances and complexity. Is love really a feeling of well-being and satisfaction? It would be necessary to ask the jealous Othello or the lovers of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, willing to die rather than be without each other. The experience of love, then, cannot be reduced to its physiological explanation, just as the passage from organized matter to life proper cannot be explained.

The complexity of the concept is such that there can be different types of love. The ancient Greeks distinguished, for example, between Eros, agape and philia: erotic love was the passionate desire, typically sexual, egocentric and selfish, dependent on the desirable attributes of the loved object; Agapic love was unconditional, thoughtful and generous love, which pushes the lover to give everything for the well-being of the beloved, and which Christians took as a model for God's love for all faithful; and finally filial love was that which occurred between members of a family and between friends or colleagues.

Also, one of the great types of love is romantic love. The latter consists fundamentally of an idealized, pure love, with deep and lasting feelings of belonging. It was a model of love very typical of Christian logic, which privileged the well-being of the immortal soul over the enjoyment of the perishable body.

The considerations with which love is counted, that is, with which it is imagined and, therefore, desired, have varied greatly throughout history. This leads us to suppose that love may be a cultural concept as well as a biological reality (a biochemical reaction) or a psychic reality (a feeling). And these three elements make up, then, the limits of what love is: that common ground between three realities, no matter which of the three arose first or which is, therefore, the "True".

Love is, therefore, a specific meeting point between three fundamental sides of humanity: the biological or bodily, the psychic or sentimental, and the social or cultural. This is a difficult concept to enunciate, elusive to logic, because it rests on its three legs in different ways: perhaps because what the ancient Greeks distinguished as three different forms of love were nothing more than three sides of the same triangle.

References:

• "Essay" in WIkipedia.
• "Love in Wikipedia.
• "Love" in the Language Dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy.
• "What is love? This is what science tells us ”in The country (Spain).
• "Love" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• "Love" in The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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