Love in philosophy – why do we love & what is love?

We make greater demands on nothing than on love. It should make happy and give freedom, be reliable and at the same time a thrill. But what about love in today’s world? Can it fulfill all these demands? Is love a feeling or an attitude? What constitutes it? This text is about the different answers in philosophy.
In a time in which dating apps, guidebooks about the eternal love happiness and of course the self-love sold by the millions, it wonders what people actually mean by love. That is, partner love and self-love. If you talk with a biologist, love would be only there to form purpose alliance between different genders at least as long as, until the common offspring stands on own legs. Also the affection among friends would be then only a means to strengthen communities. If we apply the principle to self-love, its only purpose would be to build up a bond with one’s own self. Doesn’t sound exactly like what you and I understand by love, does it? The question is also whether the bond to your self is not a prerequisite for self-love.
Love, this noble word, is even under the bushel of today’s self-realization and individualism. For one’s own self takes up quite a bit of space in the process. For another person is then a method of self-fulfillment and self-realization. Neuroscientists would again speak of chemical reactions and reduce the love between 2 people to psychological mechanisms. The hardware = the brain, the software = hormones.

what does science says about love?

Simply put, the scientific view thinks of eternal love as a state of affection. Under it there are just the different variants: Love between partners, love between parents and children, love between friends.
Let’s stay with couple love. Psychology knows today, Love changes. In evolutionary psychology, partner love is defined by Stone Age relationships. Evolutionary biology thinks of love as a further development of the sex drive. The love feeling would be then only to the consolidation of the pair relationship & protection of the reproduction.

Why does man love?

To make it short:

• Bringing together man & woman
• Supporting the reproductive instinct & survival of the species
• Satisfies existential needs for trust, closeness and security (sense of well-being)

Biologically, love manifests itself in the brain as a state of intoxication (infatuation) or a strong activation of the reward system (love relationship). At the same time, the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for rational thinking, is inhibited. Hm, rather practical thinking, I think. However, the nature of love seems to me to be little practical, if I’m honest.

Love is more than feeling

There would hardly be so many guidebooks and analyses on love if it were so simple. Also the question between the relationship of love, happiness and self-love is not clarified. The eternal love between two people is actually a paradox. Every 2nd love marriage results into divorce. Feelings are not constant and certainly not eternal. That would be bad, because you would not be able to change at all. Feelings come and go, that is absolutely normal – yes, even necessary, so that we are capable of self-reflection. In any case, love is something existential, is reflected in biological & neuronal processes and has been thought and lived differently from culture to culture – even from epoch to epoch. It is just as mysterious for the earlier people as for us today (still).

Love has a high value

Let’s stay with the partner love. In almost every culture and form of society, marriage as an institution of love is an important element. Even though it may seem to you that marriages are in decline, the statistics prove the opposite. Between 2000 and 2011, total of 90.2% of all women in the world and 88.9% of men worldwide were married. Moreover, surveys show that people are even looking for a partner for life on Tinder & Co.

Yet today’s people demand all sorts of things from love:
it needs romance, but also practical cooperation.
Love should consolidate social status, but also be erotic;
and should provide security, but also adventure.
It should offer freedom, but also reliable security.

That’s quite a lot of things that people expect. And in times of individualization, it’s a real challenge.

Love in the history of philosophy

Is love a profession of philosophy or psychology? I say both! Much of psychology is based on philosophical explanations as well as sociological & cultural factors. Also, almost everything discussed in philosophy has found its way into our thought patterns today.

Plato & Aristotle – love as knowledge

For the first time, physical love is distinguished from the eternal love of the good. While the interlocutor explains physical love with the myth of the spherical shape of man, Socrates tries to grasp love as something spiritual, not physical. For the Platonic Socrates, love was something moral, a pursuit of happiness and a path to wisdom. For him, this is also true when you love a woman or a friend who ultimately reminds you of the idea of goodness. Love here has the sense of leading to wisdom, to the knowledge of the world. Some interpreters therefore accuse Plato of alienating love as a means to an end. However, Plato’s statements must be placed in the ancient understanding of man and the cosmos in order to understand them.

“Plato thus always understands love as a desire which is intentionally directed towards this end purpose and in which ultimately nature seeks in us what is lacking and belonging to us. The eros is a form of intentional striving which goes back to a lack.

In this striving the demonic character of love is revealed as a mediator, its intermediate character as a uniting of the human and the divine, the mortal and the immortal, as a bridge between the transient and the eternal, the concrete and the general. For Plato, love always had something to do with the good and right life. That is, the great questions of being. It is not mere self-fulfillment, but goes far beyond that. Aristotle also deals with love, but has love between friends in mind. For him it belongs to virtue, but has nothing to do with covetousness. Love, in the Aristotelian sense, is to wish something good for the other, but not for your own sake, but solely out of appreciation for the other.

This interpretation has therefore also no pure self-fulfillment in mind, but a basic attitude to life, in which self-realization flows as naturally as the selfless love for the other person.

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