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Theory of love
Theory of love
Occasionally when reading I run across a phrase or sentence or paragraph, which really rings a bell for me. The bell may be recognition of the compatibility of the point to my own conclusions or perhaps the point caused an epiphany, or other reasons. When I encounter such a point I often copy it and store it in a file for later analysis. One such point is as follows: "Platonic idea that the giving and receiving of knowledge, the active formation of another's character, or the more passive growth under another's guidance, is the truest and strongest foundation of love".
My analysis of this sentence led me down a long trail over an extended period of time to an understanding of the meaning of the statement and to an agreement with the meaning of that statement.
When studying philosophy I had read some of Plato's work and had a slight remembrance of one of his Dialogues in which he dealt with the subject of love. After some study of the particular Dialogue in question and some further study of Plato's general philosophy I realized what was meant by the point made in the sentence I had saved.
Plato wrote, "An unexamined life is not worth living". I find this a bit hyperbolic but nevertheless agree with the general point. Plato also argued that the giving and receiving of knowledge, the active formation of another's character, or the more passive growth under another's guidance, is the truest and strongest foundation of love. Plato judged that the basis of love is centered upon the mutual struggle for truth.
I would not attempt to explain why Plato's Idealistic philosophy leads to this conclusion but I think one can find justification for this point of view by considering the nature of the parent to progeny relationship. Considering the nature of evolution one might easily discover that the origin of love could be observed in the obvious relationship of present day mammals. The educational relationship between the animal mother and their progeny are evident to the most casual observer.
I often watch the Discovery Channel on TV. As you probably know this channel often has a great documentary on animal life. Their audio/visual presentations give the viewer wonderful insights into the life of animals. Often the animals in question are large mammals such as lions, gorillas, monkeys, etc. I find verification of Plato's theory every time I see the relationship between mother and progeny in these documentaries.
Evolutionary Psychology is based on the theory that all human psychological traits, such as love, must be traceable to our evolutionary ancestors. The source of love in humans is evolved from the mother infant relationship in early mammals (perhaps).
I find this theory of love makes sense. Do you agree?
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"Plato judged that the basis of love is centered upon the mutual struggle for truth. "
I'm sure that's true for folks who share the struggle for truth as a primary goal. I'm not sure what percentage of the population that is though...
"An unexamined life is not worth living".
I've had a bit of trouble with that statement. There are quite a few neurotic people who obsess about their lives in negative ways. They would find life much more worth living if they were able to stop this over-examination and just enjoy...
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"An unexamined life is not worth living".
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I've had a bit of trouble with that statement. There are quite a few neurotic people who obsess about their lives in negative ways. They would find life much more worth living if they were able to stop this over-examination and just enjoy...
Hmmm, for me, this statement was an epiphany.
It caused me to look at my life, at what I was doing each and every day. It caused me to measure what I was doing against what I wanted out of life.
Do I want to work 40 hours a week until I reach 65 and can retire in my own home and maybe take a few vacations each year? Is that what I will define as a sucessful life?
I think we need to examine all aspects of our life - our jobs (both the actual work and the amount of time we spend there), our social lives, our free time, our money etc.
We can't just get through each day, each week, each month, and expect to find a pot of gold at the end. We need to decide what our pot of gold is, and then decide what we are going to do to get it. (And pot of gold is just a euphemism - not meant to imply money or wealth - but happiness and peace and contentment).
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Without the guidance of the parent the young cannot survive. As I watch these shows of animals in the wild on the Discovery Channel it seems so clear to me that this is the origin of the instinct we call love.
Truth for a lion cub is what is the correct manner to deal with a snake, or an elephant, or etc. All of which the cub learns from the mother.
Love is an instinct without which mammals would not have survived.
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What is an examined life?
My experience leads me to conclude that there is a world of difference in picking up a fragment of knowledge here and there versus seeking knowledge for an answer to a question of significance. There is a world of difference between taking a stroll in the woods on occasion versus climbing a mountain because you wish to understand what climbing a mountain is about or perhaps you want to understand what it means to accomplish a feat of significance only because you want it and not because there is 'money in it'.
I think that every adult needs to experience the act of intellectual understanding; an act that Carl Sagan describes as "Understanding is a kind of ecstasy."
This quotation of Carl Rogers might illuminate my meaning:
I want to talk about learning. But not the lifeless, sterile, futile, quickly forgotten stuff that is crammed in to the mind of the poor helpless individual tied into his seat by ironclad bonds of conformity! I am talking about LEARNING - the insatiable curiosity that drives the adolescent boy to absorb everything he can see or hear or read about gasoline engines in order to improve the efficiency and speed of his 'cruiser'. I am talking about the student who says, "I am discovering, drawing in from the outside, and making that which is drawn in a real part of me." I am talking about any learning in which the experience of the learner progresses along this line: "No, no, that's not what I want"; "Wait! This is closer to what I am interested in, what I need"; "Ah, here it is! Now I'm grasping and comprehending what I need and what I want to know!"
When we undertake such a journey of discovery we need reliable sources of information. We need information that we can build a strong foundation for understanding. Where do we find such reliable information? We find it in the library or through Google on the Internet or combinations thereof.
I have a 'Friends of the Library' card from a college near me. This card allows me, for a yearly fee of $25, to borrow any book in that gigantic library. Experts in every domain of knowledge have written books just especially for laypersons like you and I.
Lincoln was an autodidact. Perhaps self-actualizing self-learning is for you. When your school daze is complete it is a good time to begin the learning process.
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What is the 'unexamined life'? Unfortunately, it's the form of life that far too many people live: Getting up, dressing, eating, going to work, breaking for lunch, working some more, going home, eating again, watching TV, leafing through magazines, exchanging a few words with fellow family members in the house or with friends on the phone, changing for bed, and falling to sleep - just to repeat the same routine all over, and over, and over, without ever thinking about what it all means or how life should be really lived.
We wake up already in motion in this life. The raft is already out on the river, and the current simply carries us forward.
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When we're young, other people decide what we wear, what we eat, and when we can play. All too often, even after we're older, other people still decided what we do during the day. We make choices, lots of them, but often from a limited selection of options that our environment, our friends, families, and employers, and simple habit, present to us. Rarely, if ever, do we stop to reflect on what we truly want in life, on who we are and what we want to become, on what difference we want to make in the world, and thus on what's really right for US. And THAT is the unexamined life - the life that is lived at some level almost as a sleepwalker, somnambulating away the hours, days, and years. It's a life that is experienced on automatic pilot - a life based on values and beliefs that we've never really looked at, never really tested, never examined for ourselves.
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coberst wrote:
Without the guidance of the parent the young cannot survive.
That appears to be true only of particular kinds of animal, namely those species which have made an evolutionary trade on instinct for socialization. But bringing into consideration other animal species, as you've done, seems to me to confuse the issue. Are we sure that other species experience love? And if our behavior is assimilable to the behavior of, say, a lion cub, then what difference remains between the notion of love and that of socialization?
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Truth for a lion cub...
I'm not sure we have any reason to suppose that lion cubs have anything like a truth. Truth, so far as I can tell, is a notion that only has meaning when you're capable of holding in mind an idea that corresponds to nothing in reality. If we're sure that lion cubs are capable of doing that, then I suppose it makes sense to also suppose that they subscribe to a set of truths. Otherwise, I'm not so sure.
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Love is an instinct without which mammals would not have survived.
That seems a little dubious as well. Going back to other animal species, turtles survive just fine without any evident family feeling. So, on the one hand, while a strictly evolutionary instinct called love might serve as a survival strategy of one sort, it's clearly possible to survive by other means. Most mammals evidence some form of family relationship (otherwise, those mammaries would start to seem superfluous in rather short order), but that in itself does not presuppose love, anymore than the social behavior of ritualized combat in mountain rams would necessarily mean that rams "hate". So, this being the other hand, while social forms may be crucial to human survival, those social forms are not necessarily equivalent to love, nor need they provide the definitive pattern for a later development of love.
_________________ If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed. -- Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus"
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We have all kinds of ways to use the word love. If we remove all the contingencies we will find that in all cases the essence of love is an emotion, i.e. an instinct.
I love chocolate, I love mom, and I love April in Paris. Love is an instinct and love is an abstract idea. Remove all the contingencies and you are left with the emotion we call love. That feeling resulting from the emotion is really what we are speaking of. We attach that feeling to many things. Just as we attach fear to many things and these emotions help the species to survive.
We assign the same word to many things. I suspect that in many cases we are assigning the improper word. When I say I love cookies I suspect we are using the wrong word. However there is a feeling that results from emotion, which is an instinct, and that feeling like the feeling of fear can save or life. Without such an instinct the species could never have survived.
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coberst wrote:
If we remove all the contingencies we will find that in all cases the essence of love is an emotion, i.e. an instinct.
I'm not sure that's so. Can we go through the contingencies? I may not think some of them are so easily dispensed with.
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I love chocolate, I love mom, and I love April in Paris.
It seems to me that when we talk about loving chocolate or April in Paris, we're using the term mostly be analogy. Implicitly, we're saying, I like chocolate so much, it's almost the same as my love for a person. But I wouldn't think that most people genuinely love chocolate or April in Paris. To put it into context, would you consider chocolate something worth dying for?
In part, it seems like a poverty of English that we use the same word for what appear to be two different phenomenon. Japanese would use the work "suki" for strong feeling, and "ai" for love. English has "like", of course, but it's obviously not as emphatic as love -- emphasis, rather than similarity, being the usual reason that we say that we love something when we wouldn't at all entertain the idea that it was literally equivalent to our love of mom.
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Without such an instinct the species could never have survived.
Forgive me, but I don't feel that's been demonstrated yet.
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What are the emotions? The primary emotions are happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. The secondary or social emotions are such things as pride, jealousy, embarrassment, and guilt. Damasio considers the background emotions are well-being or malaise, and calm or tension. The label of emotion has also been attached to drives and motivations and to states of pain and pleasure.
Antonio Damasio, Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine, testifies in his book "The Feelings of What Happens" that the biological process of feelings begins with a 'state of emotion', which can be triggered unconsciously and is followed by 'a state of feeling', which can be presented nonconsciously; this nonconscious state can then become 'a state of feeling made conscious'.
"Emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise, and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life...emotions are biologically determined processes, depending upon innately set brain devices, laid down by long evolutionary history...The devices that produce emotions...are part of a set of structures that both regulate and represent body states...All devices can be engaged automatically, without conscious deliberation...The variety of the emotional responses is responsible for profound changes in both the body landscape and the brain landscape. The collection of these changes constitutes the substrate for the neural patterns which eventually become feelings of emotion."
The biological function of emotions is to produce an automatic action in certain situations and to regulate the internal processes so that the creature is able to support the action dictated by the situation. The biological purpose of emotions are clear, they are not a luxury but a necessity for survival.
"Emotions are inseparable from the idea of reward and punishment, pleasure or pain, of approach or withdrawal, of personal advantage or disadvantage. Inevitably, emotions are inseparable from the idea of good and evil."
Emotions result from stimulation of the senses from outside the body sources and also from stimulations from remembered situations. Evolution has provided us with emotional responses from certain types of inducers put these innate responses are often modified by our culture.
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MadArchitect wrote:
[ It seems to me that when we talk about loving chocolate or April in Paris, we're using the term mostly be analogy. Implicitly, we're saying, I like chocolate so much, it's almost the same as my love for a person. But I wouldn't think that most people genuinely love chocolate or April in Paris. To put it into context, would you consider chocolate something worth dying for?
In part, it seems like a poverty of English that we use the same word for what appear to be two different phenomenon. Japanese would use the work "suki" for strong feeling, and "ai" for love. English has "like", of course, but it's obviously not as emphatic as love -- emphasis, rather than similarity, being the usual reason that we say that we love something when we wouldn't at all entertain the idea that it was literally equivalent to our love of mom.
I think that is true...we just don't use the right words to express all our feelings. My love for my mom is not the same as my love for my fiance, or my love for my cat,or my love for Rome. If it were, I would have quite a strange life Maybe my love for my mom or her love for me could be instict I suppose. But if love is an instict, does that mean hate would be one as well?
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[quote]Maybe my love for my mom or her love for me could be instict I suppose. [/i]
I don't buy it. (And it sounds like maybe you don't, either.) My cat imprinted on me the way most kittens will imprint on a parent, and it seems perfectly reasonable to call that instinct. Human children will also imprint on human adults. And the two phenomenon seem biologically comparable, so I have no problem supposing that it's an instinct with humans as well (though apparently more mutable in humans). But I wouldn't say the sheer fact of imprinting is equivalent to love. I'm sure I imprinted on my mother when I was an infant, but that wasn't yet love. And I would say that one of the complexities of growing up human is that we're taught to love our parents, but actually coming to love them is a learning process that requires, if nothing else, the passage of time.
_________________ If this rule were always observed; if no man allowed any pursuit whatsoever to interfere with the tranquility of his domestic affections, Greece had not been enslaved, Caesar would have spared his country, America would have been discovered more gradually, and the empires of Mexico and Peru had not been destroyed. -- Mary Shelley, "Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus"
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Coberst, consider this your first warning. Either start actually interacting with other members in meaningful discussion or leave the community. You're spamming and completely ignoring everything people are saying to you. Everything you're posting here has been posted elsewhere and is simply being copied and pasted - this is called SPAMMING.
Evidence of your spamming
Your first post in this thread was copied and pasted from here. SciForums.com You actually spammed it at numerous other boards too.
After making your spam post LanDroid invests his time and energy into attempting to engage you in discussion. Did you read his reply and comment on it? No, you ignored him. Then Jales4 attempted to enter into a discussion with you. You blew off her post too.
Your next post in this thread was another spam post found at SkepticForum.com This time you were too lazy to copy the whole post so you just gave us a few copied and pasted sentences out of context. Weird behavior, Coberst. In 6+ years I've yet too see this phenomenon on BookTalk.org.
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Next, Coberst doesn't even wait for another person to reply. Heck, he would just ignore them anyway. His next post is copied and pasted from Physorg Forums Not a word has been changed.
Jales4 again attempts to talk to you. You blow her off in favor of copying and pasting from your posts on other forums. Are those posts even yours? Aren't we worth talking to or are we only worthy of your spam?
MadArchitect speaks to you and again no reply. Instead we get more spam copied and pasted from SkepticForum.com
Coberst, give us original content and some sort of interaction or you will lose your welcome here. We don't allow preaching or spamming.
_________________ We generated $419.10 in donations for Christmas gifts for the kids at the Cleveland Christian Home this year. Thank you so much for helping make their Christmas a bit brighter! The gifts have been ordered from Amazon.com and I've posted the invoice.
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Chris
I have no intention of engaging with your adolescent game of personal attacks. If this membership is unable to deal with ideas in a mature manner then you do what you wish regarding my membership. I do not consider my membership in a forum as being like going study in high school.
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