Philosophers on Love III

Emotional Theory of Love
We have seen that the robust concern view and the value bestowal view both have their own problems. We may perhaps consider another view of love. It is a view that considers love as essentially emotional in character, "emotions" being  understood as "responses to the beloved which involve evaluation, motivation, and a kind of
phenomenology of feeling". If so, many philosophers think that love is essentially an emotion e.g. R Wollheim, (The Thread of Life, 1984), A O Rorty,  “Introduction”, in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, 1980 1-8 and “The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds”, in Badhwar 1993, 73–88.), R Brown,  Analyzing Love (1987), D W Hamlyn, “The Phenomena of Love and Hate”, in Soble's  Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love,1989, 218–234., A C Baier,  “Unsafe Loves” in R C Solomon & K M Higgins  (eds.), The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love 1991, 433–50, and Badhwar “Love”, in H. LaFollette (ed.), Practical Ethics (2003). 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?"

According to Rorty (Explaining Emotions 1980), the problem with this view is that philosophers may be using the word "emotion" as meaning different kinds of mental states and there does not appear to be agreement on what that " homogeneous
collection of mental states" may be. So various theories claiming that love is an emotion may mean very different things. Helm therefore divides such philosophical views into two classes: 
1. those that understand love to be a particular kind of evaluative-cum-motivational
response to an object (whether such response be merely occurrent or dispositional 
and 
2. those that understand love to involve a collection of related and interconnected emotions.

Love as Emotion Proper
To Helm, an "emotion proper"  is "a kind of evaluative-cum-motivational response to an object”. He explains. Emotions are generally understood to have several
components. The "target" of an emotion is "that at which the emotion is directed" e.g. 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, (the formal object) is the kind of evaluation of the target that is distinctive of a particular emotion type ( e.g attraction, fear, anger, disappointment, joy, sadness etc). If I fear you, I implicitly evaluate you as somehow dangerous. In being angry at you I implicitly evaluate you as somehow offensive. In addition, emotions also motivate us to behave in certain ways, both rationally (by moving me to avoid the danger) and a-rationally (via certain characteristic expressions, such as slamming a door out of
anger). More, emotions may also have a certain phenomenological "feel" to them though exactly how to describe such a characteristic emotional  “feel” and how such a feel may be related to the evaluational and motivational component of love is hotly disputed. Finally, emotions are typically understood to be passions: responses that we feel are imposed on us as if from the outside, rather than anything we actively do.

What do we mean when we say that love is an emotion proper?
To R Brown ( Analyzing Love, 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.” . In love, we “cherish” the person for having “a particular complex of instantiated qualities”( historical and relational) that is “open-ended” so that we can continue to love the person even as she changes over time (pp. 106–7). Such  qualities are evaluated in love as worthwhile i.e. love's formal object is evaluated as being worthwhile as a person. But Brown resists being any more specific than this perhaps to preserve love's open-endedness. D W Hamlyn's  views ( “The Phenomena of Love and Hate”,in Soble (1989, 228) are or less the same: "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". To him, love and hate might be primordial emotions, a kind of positive or negative “feeling towards,” that is presupposed by all other emotions. Helm is unhappy with both such definitions. In Hamlyn's case, he says that love is a too generic pro-attitude, instead of being a specifically personal attitude. In Brown's case, evaluating object of love as a worthwhile person "fails to distinguish love from other evaluative responses like admiration and respect". Helm thinks that their account of love as an emotion fails to enrich the concept of emotion itself. He says, "It is not at all clear whether the idea of an “emotion proper” can be adequately enriched so as to do so.

Love as an emotional complex

Rorty (1986/1993) does not try to present a complete account of love. She merely focuses on the idea that “relational psychological attitudes” , like love, involving both emotional and desiderative responses, exhibit historicity: “they arise from, and are shaped by, dynamic interactions between a subject and an object” (p. 73). Love
is viewed not just as our emotional state vis-a-vis our beloved at a specific moment in time. It can only be “identified by a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75). Moreover, Rorty argues, the historicity of love involves the lover's being permanently
transformed by the beloved.

A C Baier ( “Unsafe Loves”, in Solomon & Higgins (eds.),  The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love 1991, 444) shares Rorty's historical view of love: "Love is not just an emotion people feel toward other people, but also a complex tying together of the emotions that two or a few more people have; it is a special form of emotional inter-dependence". e.g. I feel disappointed and frustrated on behalf of my beloved when she fails, and joyful when she succeeds but Baier insists that love is “more than just the duplication of the emotion of each in a sympathetic echo in the other” (p. 442): the relevant emotional interdependence between lovers also involves making appropriate follow-up responses to the emotional predicaments of your beloved e.g 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 e.g feeling hurt when she is indifferent to you. Such cut and thrust of mutual emotional attentiveness and responsiveness fosters a very special kind of intimate emotional inter-dependence between lovers.

Badhwar (“Love”, in H. LaFollette (ed.), Practical Ethics,  2003, p. 46) views love as a matter of “one's overall emotional orientation towards a person—the complex of perceptions, thoughts, and feelings”. Such an emotional orientation may have a certain “character structure.”, something 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. This "look of love" also provides the beloved a reliable testimony of  the quality of the beloved's character and actions (p. 57).

To Helm, there is "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.". 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. This view of love as a complex unfolding in the history of dynamic constant mutual emotional evaluation and response between lovers brings out the "depth" of love and also help to elucidate complex phenomenology of love: love can at times be a matter of intense pleasure at 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.

Not only does love involve us in responding to the emotional response of our lover, the love relationship may actually help us grow and develop into a more complex and more fully formed human being. In the course of the history of the relevant emotional
interdependence, the loving relationship may actually transform us as a person and thus alter our identity! To Helm, it is partly Rorty's point (1986/1993) in focusing on the historicity of love  She thinks that an important feature of such historicity is that
love is “dynamically permeable”: the lover is continually “changed by loving” such that these changes “tend to ramify through a person's character” (p. 77)."Through such dynamic permeability, love transforms the identity of the lover in a way that can sometimes foster the continuity of the love, as each lover continually changes in response to the changes in the other." Rorty thus thinks that  love should be understood in terms of “a characteristic narrative history” (p. 75) that results from such dynamic permeability. However dynamic permeability does not necessarily guarantee that the relevant loving relationship will continue because nothing about the dynamics of a relationship requires that the characteristic narrative history project into the future. Such dynamic permeability can as likely lead to the dissolution of the love e.g when one party changes but the other remains unresponsive to such new changes in the attitude, conduct and personality of her lover. To Helm, "love is therefore risky—indeed, all the more risky because of the way the identity of the lover is defined in part through the love." The loss of a love can therefore make one feel no longer oneself in ways poignantly described by M Nussbaum (“Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration”, in Love's Knowledge:
Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 1990  314–34.), says Helm. .

To Helm, the "emotion complex" view, which understands love to be a complex emotional attitude towards another person, is thus superior to the other views because by articulating the emotional interconnections between persons, it may help explain 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.

But there are still other problems: we need a much more explicit account  of  what ties all of these emotional responses together into a single thing, namely love? e.g. 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?It may depend upon the specific history of the specific kind of love relationship forged between the two lovers such that some form of intimacy may allow for tender teasing responses to each other whilst other love relationships may not. To Helm "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." but she thinks this answer inadequate. She argues that not just any historical relationship involving emotional interdependence is a loving relationship. " We 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?"


B W Helm (“Love, Identification, and the Emotions”, American Philosophical Quarterly,2009 46:39–59.) tries to answer some these questions by treating love as intimate identification. "To love another is to care about him as the particular person he is and so, other things being equal, to value the things he values. Insofar as a
person's (structured) set of values—his sense of the kind of life worth his living—constitutes his identity as a person, such sharing of values amounts to sharing his identity, which sounds very much like union accounts of love", he says. But such sharing of values is for the sake of the beloved (as robust concern accounts insist). Emotions not only have a target and a formal object (as indicated above) but also
a focus:(a background object the subject cares about in terms of which the implicit evaluation of the target is made intelligible) e.g if I am afraid of the approaching
hailstorm, I evaluate it as dangerous by observing the way that hailstorm bears on the vegetable garden I care about and focus on that garden as the object of my fear but  emotions usually come in series with a common focus e.g fearing the hailstorm may be associated to such emotions as being relieved when it passes by harmlessly or feeling disappointed or sad when it does not, being angry at the rabbits for killing the spinach, being delighted at the productivity of the tomato plants, etc. Helm argues
that what he calls "a projectible pattern" of such emotions with a common focus
constitute caring about that focus. He analyzes some emotions as person-focused emotions e.g pride and shame focusing on various relevant target persons. Emotions are implicitly evaluated in terms how they may affect the target person's quality of life. A pattern of such emotions focused on myself and subfocused on my role of mother, for example, may involve caring about and evaluating how acting as a mother may affect the kind of life I find worth living and this in turn may affect my identity as a person; to care in this way is to value being a mother as a part of my concern for my own identity. Likewise, to  form "a projectible pattern" of such emotions focused on someone else and subfocused on his being a father is to value this as a part of my concern for his identity—to value it for his sake. Love is thus such a sharing of
the beloved values for his sake, involving trust, respect, and affection and intimate
identification with him. This account of love is grounded in caring for the beloved and caring about what he cares about, his interest, concerns and fate. Through the relevant intimate emotional identification, it makes room for the intuitive “depth” of love. 

The Value and Justification of Love
The 6 million dollar question is: why do we love?
Any account of love which fails to address this question must be considered inadequate. Do we love our beloved for certain qualities and properties she possesses or do we love her because she is what she is?

To Helm, we love our beloved because our beloved is not fungible: no one could simply take her place without loss but different theories may approach these questions differently. However, the question of justification is primary. What do we get out of a loving relationship?

Aristotle thinks that having loving relationships may promotes self-knowledge insofar as our beloved acts as a kind of mirror, reflecting our character back to us (Badhwar, 2003, p. 58). To Helm, "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." But D O Brink (“Eudaimonism, Love and Friendship, and Political Community”, Social Philosophy & Policy, 1999 16:252–289. pp. 264–65) argues that if our aim is not just to know our selves better but to improve ourselves, we ought also to interact with others who are not just like ourselves because interacting with such different personalities may give us new ideas on how to live in various different ways and enable us to better assess the relative merits of our existing ways of life and thus open up new possibilities of further development. Helm advises us not to take the metaphor of the mirror quite so literally. He says, "rather, our beloved 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."

H LaFollette ( Personal Relationships: Love, Identity, and Morality, 1996 Cap 5) however, suggests several other reasons why it is good to love: love increases our sense of well-being, elevates our sense of self-worth, and serves to develop our character.

Helm thinks that love also tends to lower stress and blood pressure and to increase health and longevity. M A Friedman (What Are Friends For? Feminist
Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory,1993) 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” (p. 61). R C Solomon ( About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times 1988, p. 155)  claims that " Ultimately, there is only one reason for love. That one grand reason…is “because we bring out the best in each other.” because in loving someone, I want myself to be better so as to be worthy of his love for me. To Helm, what counts as “the best,” of course, is subject to much individual variation Besides he thinks that such answers are general and does not taker into account specific  relationships e.g questions like what, if anything, justifies my loving rather than not loving this particular person and not someone else and why I should continue to love this particular person given the changes—both in him and me and in the overall circumstances—that have occurred since I began loving him?

We learn earlier that Velleman (1999) thinks we can answer the first question by appealing to the fact that my beloved is a person and so has a rational nature but does not have any answer for latter questions. E Telfer (“Friendship”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1970-71 71:223–41)  Friedman (1993); Singer (The Pursuit of Love 1994) all claim that no justification can be given and L Thomas also 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” (“Reasons for Loving”, in Solomon & Higgins 1991, 467–476), p. 474) because  "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."(471).

LaFollette (1996, p. 63) does not agree. He says "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." We may not have any compellable reason to love or to cease to love someone but that does not mean we have no reasons at all to love or to cease to love another. The reason why we love another may be 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 Helm, such questions may be answered by asking why our beloveds are fungible. Given the importance love can have both in our lives and, especially, in shaping our identities as persons, to reject the idea that we can love for reasons may reduce the impact our agency can have in defining who we are. However in Plato and Aristotle accounts of love, they think that love is a kind of knowledge and we love people for the properties they possess and we are to love people only because and insofar as they are objectifications of the excellences. Vlastos  notes that these accounts focus on the properties of our beloveds as particular types of persons instead of them as persons (“The Individual as Object of Love in Plato”, in Platonic Studies, 1981  3–42, 2nd edn. ). He argues consequently that in doing so they fail to distinguish “disinterested affection for the person we love” from “appreciation of the excellences instantiated by that person” (p. 33).

To Helm, 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. Thus Helm think that it is "surely insufficient to say, as Solomon (1988, p. 154) does, that “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”.

The final question about the worth of the beloved is her fungibility or irreplaceability (whether or not she is replaceable by another object or person without any material loss in her value). Is the object of love fungible? Can I simply switch from loving one person to loving another relevantly similar person without any loss?

If we love our beloved because she has certain properties, we do not love her as the individual that she is but only as a person instantiating those properties. This would mean any other person instantiating those same properties would do just as well. If so, my beloved would be fungible. Indeed, it may be that another person may exhibit the properties that ground my love to a greater degree than my current beloved does. If so, then I may have good reason to “trade up” or to switch my love to the new, better person. However, to Helm, 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. To justify this, 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." [p. 78] In trading up, we betray and destroy an inalienable part of our self in the form it has since taken in the shape one's extended or enlarged joint selves. My identity as a person depends essentially on that “we” so that it is not possible to substitute without loss one object of my love for another.

Badhwar (2003) disagrees with  Nozick, saying that Nozick's view implies that once I love my beloved, I cannot abandon that beloved no matter what that beloved has become as a person. This she says is more an addition than love. (p.61). Instead, Badhwar (1987) prefers her robust-concern account of love as a concern for the beloved for his sake rather than one's own. On this view, 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 and in this sense, my beloved is in this way irreplaceable. But this is only a partial response to the worry about fungibility, as Badhwar herself seems to acknowledge. The problem of 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 (2003) concludes that the object of love is fungible after all (though she insists that it is very unlikely in practice)Soble's (1990, Chapter 13) views are similar. But still Badhwar argues that the object of love is “phenomenologically non-fungible” (2003, p. 63) ie. we experience our beloveds to
be irreplaceable: “loving and delighting in [one person] are not completely commensurate with loving and delighting in another” (1987, p. 14). Helm thinks that 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, he asks? It seems as though the typical reason I now want to spend time with Amy rather than Mary is, for example, that Amy is funny but Mary is not. I love Amy
in part for her humor, and I love Mary 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 Mary were to be at least as funny (charming, kind, etc.) as Amy, why shouldn’t I dump Amy and spend all my time with Mary?

Whiting (1991) argues that Vlastos offers a false dichotomy on the question of the object of love. He opines that having disinterested affection for someone (for her sake rather than my own) involves essentially an appreciation of her excellences as
such and it is in part her excellences which constitute her identity as the person that she is. It is thus illegitimate to separate a person's qualities or excellences from that person as a whole. So even if I have disinterested affection for my beloved as a person, I have implicitly also included therein my selfish affection for her excellences or qualities.  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 one of  disinterested affection  (ie. one of love) for the beloved is precisely that I am thereby responding to her excellences as the reasons for than affection. 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 explain why I like Amy and not Mary, both Whiting and Delaney appeal explicitly to the historical relationship e.g Whiting claims that 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 why I love only one of them rather than another that person within this pool, once I have come to love Amy 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 Amy in “historical-relational properties” (1996, p. 346), so that I have reasons for continuing to love Amy rather than switching allegiances and loving Mary. In each case, the appeal to both such historical relations and the excellences of character of Amy is intended to provide an answer to the third question above and this explains why the objects of love are not fungible. To Helm, "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." But it is still unclear how the historical-relational properties can provide any additional justification for subsequent concern beyond that which is already provided (as an answer to our first question  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 Helm says, 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 remains an open question. For an interesting attempt at an answer, Helm urges us to see Kolodny 2003)

To conclude, Helm says : "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.". Love is never easy. Not even, or should I say, particularly, for philosophers! Whatever the truth may be, I hope Helm has helped us realize at least where some of the trouble spots in our journey to love may be lying in wait for us.

Philosophers on Love II

Love as Robust Concern
Some philosophers think that the most essential element in love is caring about your beloved for her own sake and it is this which is the most central and defining quality of love.(cf. G Taylor, “Love”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1976:147–64; W Newton-Smith, W. “A Conceptual Investigation of Love”, in A Soble (ed)  Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love, 1989, 199–217 ; The Structure of Love, 1990, “Union, Autonomy, and Concern”, in R E Lamb (ed.) Love Analyzed (1997), 65–92.; H LaFollette,  Personal Relationships: Love, Identity,
and Morality,1996; H Frankfurt “Autonomy, Necessity, and Love”, in Necessity, Volition, and Love, 1999 129–41; White 2001). 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 this view, love is not to be understood as the literal or metaphorical creation of a "we" because my concern for the beloved, though for the sake of the beloved and thus not egoistic, is still my concern. Love is thus neither affective nor cognitive but volitional (Frankfurt 1999, p. 129) : "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." All the other emotions are understood in terms of desires. I can thus be emotionally crushed when one of my strong desires is disappointed and equally crushed when things 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 will transform my identity through her influence insofar as I become vulnerable to things that happen to her. But Taylor (1976) and Soble (The Structure of Love 1990) refuse to see one's identity being bound up with his beloved in this sort of way. In the middle is E Stump ( “Love by All Accounts”, Presidential Address to the Central APA, Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 80:25–43. (2006). He follows Aquinas in thinking that love involves not only a desire for your beloved's well-being but also a desire for a certain kind of relationship with your beloved .e.g. as a parent or spouse or sibling or priest or friend, for example—a relationship within which you share yourself with and connect yourself to your beloved.

Some philosopher criticize this robust concern view because by overemphasizing such robust concern, one's own emotional responsiveness to one's beloved will be treated as  merely the effects of that concern rather than part of what it means to love someone. Thus J D. Velleman ( “Love as a Moral Emotion”,Ethics, 109 : 338 -74 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), makes love merely
conative.  Velleman thinks that it is also possible that love may have nothing to do with desires to benefit the beloved  e.g we may sometimes still have a love relation (by act or conduct) with a troublemaking relative who is someone whom we do not want to be with and whose well being we do not really desire or want to promote, etc.  N. K Badhwar also ( “Friends as Ends in Themselves”, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 48:1–23.(2003) asks how  “we can continue to love someone long after death has taken him beyond harm or benefit” (p. 46) if we think that caring for the welfare of the beloved is essential to the love relations . Moreover they argue that if love is essentially just a desire for someone's benefit, then it implies that we lack something; yet love does not necessarily imply this and, indeed, can be felt most strongly at times when we feel our lives most complete and lacking in
nothing. Thus Velleman and Badhwar conclude, love need not involve any desire or concern for the well-being of one's beloved! But to Helm, such objection are not unanswerable: one may feel concern for your relative in Velleman's example but such feeling may be swamped by other, more powerful desires to avoid him. We may often want to benefit a troublesome relative although we may not otherwise love him or alternatively we may love someone without wanting or desiring to help him.We may also  explain why we love a dead relative although it is no longer necessary for us to be concerned for his welfare as a kind of residual emotion parasitic on the former love you had for him when he was still alive: your desires to benefit him in such a case get transformed after his death into pure wishes and desires. It may also be argued that 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 possible future cases when we can come to his aid and consequently to have the relevant desires. All of this seems fully compatible with
the robust concern view. In addition, Helm queries if  Velleman and Badhwar's examples of meddlesome relation or s a dead beloved are typical cases or merely atypical deficient cases. To Helm, they ought therefore be treated as parasitic on the standard cases. "Readily to accommodate such deficient cases of love into a philosophical analysis as being on a par with paradigm cases, and to do so without some special justification, is dubious"says Helm. As it stands, robust concern view does not seem able to account for the intuitive “depth” of love and so does not seem to properly distinguish loving from liking. Although the robust concern view can make some sense of the way in which the lover's identity is altered by the beloved, it understands this only as an effect of love, and not as a central part of what love consists in.

Love as a kind of Valuing
A third theory of the nature of love is the view that love is a distinctive mode of valuing a person. As the distinction between eros and agape explained above, there are at least two ways to construe this in terms of whether 
(a) the lover values the beloved because she is valuable in herself in which case, the lover confers value on the beloved  or 
(b) whether the beloved becomes valuable to the lover only as a result her loving him. The former view which understands the lover as appraising the value of the beloved in loving him and the latter view which understands her as bestowing value on him will be discussed below.

(a) Love as appraisal of value
Velleman (1999, 2008) thinks that love is fundamentally a matter of acknowledging and responding in a distinctive way to the value of the beloved. (For a very different
appraisal view of love, see N Kolodny, “Love as Valuing a Relationship”, The Philosophical Review, 112:135–89.2003.) However, love may involve not merely appraisal but also robust concern for the beloved e.g the quote from  Taylor above.
However what makes the appraisal views special is that it considers love to consist in that appraisal.

To what kind of value of the beloved does the lover  responds and what marks the nature of such a response? Like Kant, Velleman thinks that it is important that we distinguish between the value of a person from his market price (a price is a value that can be compared to the value of other equivalent items or things in the market with prices which can be mutually exchanged or which are interchangeable without much loss in value). By contrast, "to have dignity is to have a value such that
comparisons of relative value become meaningless." Material goods have prices, but only human beings 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." To Kant, our dignity as persons consists in our rationalnature: our capacity both to be actuated by reasons that we autonomously provide ourselves in setting our own goals or ends and to respond appropriately to the intrinsic values we discover in the world. e.g to the dignity of other persons who also possess similar capacities for mutual respect), respect being the minimal response we accord to the the dignity of a human person i.e. not to treat others as a means to our ends (p. 360).Velleman claims it is the dignity of our beloved that justifies that love. But whereas respect merely arrests our self-love, love arrests "our tendencies toward emotional self-protection from another person, tendencies to draw ourselves in and close ourselves off from being affected by him. Love disarms our emotional defenses; it makes us vulnerable to the other. [1999, p. 361]" What this means is 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). "  This explains the intuitive “depth” of love: it is essentially a response to persons as such. Thus to say you love your dog is to be
confused. A dog simply does not have the kind of dignity due to a human being.

Helms says that "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 (1999, p. 372), 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. Rather, what he offers is an explanation of the selectivity of my love, an explanation that as a matter of fact makes my response that of love rather than that of mere respect.

To Helm, merely being able to explain "the selectivity of love" but not being able to justify why we should love or continue to love one person but not another is "potentially troubling" because we ordinarily think we should be able to justify not only why John should love  Mary and not Martha but also and more importantly why John should remain faithful to Mary as she  changes in certain fundamental ways (but not others). As Delaney (1996, p. 347) puts it, the difficulty about constancy is that "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 question is not merely that we 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 Helm, to "have these good reasons seems to involve attributing different values to you now rather than to you formerly or to you 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." Helm also queries whether Velleman can properly explain even "the selectivity of love in terms of the “fit” between your expressions and my sensitivities" because "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."

To Helm, although these problems are specific to Velleman's account, the difficulty can be generalized to any appraisal account of love (such as that offered in Kolodny 2003; "if love is an appraisal, it needs to be distinguished from other forms of appraisal, including our evaluative judgments" but to try to distinguish "love as an appraisal" from "other appraisals in terms of love's having certain effects on our emotional and motivational life (as on Velleman's account)" is unsatisfying because it ignores part of what needs to be explained: why the appraisal of love has these
effects and yet judgments with the same evaluative content do not. Indeed, this
question is crucial if we are to understand the intuitive “depth” of love, for without an answer to this question we do not understand why love should have the kind of centrality in our lives it manifestly does. On the other hand, to bundle this emotional component into the appraisal itself would be to turn the view into either the robust
concernview or a variant of the emotion view to be discussed below.

(b) Love as Bestowal of Value
In contrast to Velleman, Singer (1991, 1994, 2009) thinks that love is fundamentally a matter of bestowing value on the beloved. ( ie. to project a kind of intrinsic value onto her and of getting attached and committed to the beloved and to treat her as an end in herself and so to respond to her ends, interests and concerns etc. as having value for their own sake manifested by "caring about what his beloved needs and interests, by wishing to benefit and protect her and by delighting in what delighting in her achievements" etc. 1991 p 270): something which distinguishes love from liking: “Love is an attitude with no clear objective,” whereas liking is inherently teleological "(1991, p. 272). As such, there are no set criteria of correctness for bestowing
such value. This is how love differs from other personal attitudes like gratitude, generosity, and condescension: “love…confers importance no matter what the
object is worth” (p. 273). Thus he thinks that "love is not an attitude that can be justified in any way." This looks remarkably like the robust concern view of love except that Singer thinks that showing such robust concern should be looked upon as the effect of the bestowal of value and that it is the bestowal of value upon the beloved
that is the essence of love rather than the attitude of concern 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." But to bestow value on someone, I must respond appropriately to him as valuable. To know what is appropriate, I must have some sense of what his well-being is and of what may positively or negatively affect such well-being, knowing and appraising in various ways what his strengths and deficiencies are. So "bestowal of value upon the beloved" presupposes a kind of appraisal as a way of “really seeing” the beloved and attending to him. But to Singer, it is the bestowal that is primary for understanding what love consists in: the appraisal is needed only so that one may be committed to one's beloved. His value as thus bestowed has practical import and is not “a blind submission to some unknown being” (1991,p. 272; see also Singer 1994, pp. 139ff).  Insofar as the account is fundamentally abestowal account, Singer claims that love cannot be justified and that webestow the relevant kind of value “gratuitously.” To Helm, this suggests that love is blind and that it does not matter what our belovedis like. This seems " patently false." To Helm, it is only because we appraise another as having certain virtues and vices that we come to bestow value on him but the “because” here, since it cannot justify the bestowal, is "at best a kind of contingent causal explanation."So to Helm,  Singer's account of the selectivity of love is much the same as Velleman's, and it is liable to the same criticism i.e.: it cannot explain how 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 because 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 being already there in the object as the grounds of that “bestowal.”

Helm thinks that Singer must explain precisely what a bestowal is e.g what is the value that I create in a bestowal, and how can my bestowal create it? To him, a crude  answer might be that the value is something projected onto the world through my
pro-attitudes, like desire. Yet such a view is inadequate because the projected value, being relative to a particular individual, would do no theoretical work, and the account would essentially be a variant of the robust concern view. He thinks that in providing a bestowal account of love, care is needed to distinguish love from other personal
attitudes such as admiration and respect: do these other attitudes involve bestowal? If so, how does the bestowal in these cases differ from the bestowal of love? If not, why not, and what is so special about love that requires a fundamentally different evaluative attitude than admiration and respect? Yet Helm thinks that there is "a kernel of truth in the bestowal view: there is surely something right about the idea that love is creative and not merely a response to antecedent value, and accounts of love that
understand the kind of evaluation implicit in love merely in terms of appraisal seem to be missing something". Precisely what may be missing may well be emotions.

Philosophers on Love. I

Love is a subject knowledge of which none can afford to not to have. Love is on the lips and constantly in the thought of all people "in love". People tend to want their love to remain unchanged from the moment they fall in love and to want it to last forever or as they sometimes say, to be "eternal" . Poets and song writers never cease to sing about the beauty, magic, the rapture of love and as frequently repine its loss and their longings for love. Everybody thinks he is qualified to talk about it from their own most intimate personal experience. Each one has his own story of love found or love lost. Love makes the world go round!  It is something within which we have our being. Yet few want to know the "truth" about love, something they desperately need but seldom bother to find out, often until it is too late, when they mourn its loss and then mindlessly and blissfully drift into another starry-eyed voyage in the land of love, in search of another dream lover, until disaster strikes again and they go through another heart-rending round of depression and perhaps  even contemplate taking their own lives. What is love? Is it something like what Augustine says about time: "What, then, is time? If no one ask of me, I know; if I wish to explain it to him who asks, I know not" What then is the nature of love? What can we reasonably expect it to do for us? What kind of things can it never be expected to do for us? What kind of ideas and values should we take with us when we think or feel that we are about to fall in love or fall in love again? Is there anything useful philosophers, who are supposed to be wise  people who have thought long and hard on various topics which may touch on human life, have to say about this most universal and absorbing subject. I turn to my favourite resource, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. What follows is what I found. It's written by Bennett Helm.

He writes about what  he calls "personal love". We love our wives, our mothers, our children and our friends and objects or activities we like to do very differently. He asks: "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?"

He says that we often say e.g  that  1 "I love chocolate (or skiing" or 2. "I love doing philosophy or being a father" or 3. "I love my dog or cat" or 4. "I love my wife, mother, child or friend" etc. In (1), it merely means that I like this thing
or activity very much. In (2) I typically imply 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 or that I value these. By contrast, (3) and (4) seem to indicate "a mode of concern that cannot be neatly assimilated to anything else." There, it implies that it is a matter of caring about another animal or person as the animal or 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". But Helm  wishes to focus primarily on
the sort of love for people as a person.

From Greek times, philosophers have analyzed love into three different partially overlapping components eros (a passionate sexual desire for a person as an object, an egocentric or selfish and acquisitive desire for the object of one's desire or more generally for some quality in such object eg. beauty or generally  goodness, and in the latter case as being responsive to its merits and to that extent dependent on reason; ; agape a creative and initiatory love that does not depend upon the value of its object e.g the sort of love God has for us as an individual person or our love for God, irrespective of whether the object of our love deserves it and irrespective of the individual character or qualities of the object of our love and, by extension, of our love for each other, a kind of brotherly love and is “spontaneous and unmotivated,” : it is a kind of love for the sake of loving and philia (a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one's friends and more generally towards family members, business partners, and one's country at large. Like eros, philia generally but not universally depends on the qualities of the object of one's beloved but without the sexual element. Thus love in its various form may be understood generally as a positive attitude we take towards our beloved. It is a more intensive form of liking (which may often treats the beloved as an object  which does not have any intrinsic (value in itself) but as having chiefly but not exclusively instrumental value in satisfying our personal desire). Some philosophers  distinguish loving from liking by the "depth" of the relevant feeling and think that loving involves an "identification" of the lover with her beloved: to love someone is somehow to identify yourself with him. It involves much greater "commitment": it's like choosing and dedicating oneself to particular way of life with the beloved . Helm says that another " common way to distinguish love from other personal attitudes is in terms of a distinctive kind of evaluation, which itself can account for love's “depth.”". If love also involves evaluation,  we can "justify" loving or continuing to love a particular beloved only if the beloved "deserves" to be so loved ie. how constant or committed is the beloved's commitment to the continuation of the love relationship.

Helm classifies "theories of love" into four types:
 (1) love as union
 (2) love as robust concern
 (3) love as valuing and
 (4) love as an emotion
but sensibly puts in a caveat that the ideas in such theories are not mutually exclusive and may often overlap because all schemes of classification tend to be reductionistic, never comprehensive. As a result, there is no clear and obvious way to classify particular theories, let alone identify what the relevant classes should be.

Love as Union

According to this view, which goes back to Aristotle (cf. N. Sherman  “Aristotle on the Shared Life”,1987 in N K. Badhwar “Friends as Ends in Themselves”, Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, 48:1–23(1993), 91–107.1993), also found in M Montaigne ( Essays of Montaigne.1603/1877) and G. W. F Hegel ( “A Fragment on Love”, in R C Solomon & K M Higgins (eds.) The Philosophy of (Erotic) Love,. (1991), 117–20 &.1997) and proposed by such contemporary philosophers as Solomon (1981, 1988), R Scruton (Sexual Desire: A Moral Philosophy of the Erotic, 1986) R  Nozick ( “Love's Bond”, in The Examined Life: Philosophical Meditations, 68–86.1989), M Fisher (Personal Love,1990), and N Delaney (“Romantic Love and Loving Commitment: Articulating a Modern Ideal”, American Philosophical
Quarterly, 33:375–405.1996), love consists in the desire to to the formation of some significant union, a “we., a union which may be a new metaphorical entity derived from but cannot be wholly identified with each member of such a union. Thus Scruton claims that love, especially romantic 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): whenever a lover acts, it is not just for his/her sake or interest alone but for the joint or common interest of both . Fisher thinks that love is only  a partial fusion of the lovers’ cares, concerns, emotional responses, and actions. But both think that love requires the actual union of the lovers’ concerns, for only then will it become clear that they conceive of love not so much as an attitude we
take towards another but as an actualized relationship:"the distinction between
your interests and mine genuinely disappears only when we together come to have shared cares, concerns, etc.," Solomon (1988) too thinks that union implies trying “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 although he does not define what a "soul" is): 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 lovers share their interests, roles, virtues in such a way that what formerly were two individual identities now become a shared identity, by each allowing the other to play an important role in defining his own identity. But Nozick thinks that all that is necessary for love is merely the desire to form a “we,”
together with the desire or expectation that your beloved reciprocates. But he too thinks 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” (p. 70): there will thus be a “pooling”  of their well-beings, in that the well-being of each is inseparably tied up with that of the other. However, although each still retains his/her "autonomy" but “each transfers some previous [individual] rights to make certain decisions unilaterally into a joint pool” (p. 71). In addition, Nozick claims, the lovers each acquires 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” (p. 72).
He gives an example of particular interest to couples who like to read: "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.^"

Some philosophers think the union view too restrictive. To them, the lovers should never give up their individual autonomy and should retain control not only on what she does but also who she is, as this is constituted by her interests, values, concerns,
etc. but by blurring the  clear distinction between the individual interests of each, the union view undermines the autonomy of the lovers. Helms says that ""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 (I Singer 1984, The Nature of Love, Volume 1: Plato to Luther,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."  Nozick (1989) does not agree. He thinks that a loss of autonomy in love is a desirable feature of the sort of union lovers can achieve. Fisher (1990)  thinks that the loss of autonomy in love is an acceptable consequence of love. Solomon (1988,pp. 64ff) rightly describes this “tension” between union and autonomy as “the paradox of love.” But A Soble. (ed.) Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love, (1997) thinks that calling it a paradox does not solve the problem.

Another line of philosophers thinks that  part of what it means to love another is precisely to be concerned for the interest of the beloved for the beloved's sake, not one's own but the union views make such a concern unintelligible in that it tries to obliterate 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 (Soble see also L A Blum Friendship, Altruism, and Morality,1980, (ed.) Friendship: A Philosophical Reader 1993). But the unionists retort that a  lover will now freely and voluntarily view his/her own individual interest as as inextricably bound to the joint interest of both, and part of the way he demonstrates his individual  autonomy is by consciously surrendering it in the common interest of both lovers: his own individual interest now being viewed as a part of the newly forged "joint enterprise" for which he is prepared to give up part of his rights. It's a bit like the idea of aporia" a being or person deliberately emptying himself and giving up or depriving himself of certain of his rights and interest in favour of a greater project, rather like Jesus emptying his God nature to become man and to suffer as a man for the sake of our salvation and the Buddha voluntarily refusing to achieve nirvana by staying on for another 40 odd years to teach the Dharma of enlightenment to the un-enlightened . Man is always split between two contradictory desires: his/her desire to be loved unselfishly (for fear of otherwise being exploited) and his/her desire to be loved for reasons (which presumably are attractive to our lover and hence have a kind of selfish basis).Helm quotes Delaney: (96, p. 346) : "Given my view that the romantic ideal is primarily characterized by a desire to achieve a profound consolidation of needs and interests through the formation of a we, I do not think a little selfishness of the sort described should pose a worry to either party."The objection, however, lies precisely in this attempt to explain my
concern for my beloved egoistically. Helms seems to agree with J E Whiting ( “Impersonal Friends”, Monist, 74:3–29.1991, p. 10)  who says that such an attempt “strikes me as unnecessary and potentially objectionable colonization”: in love, I ought to be concerned with my beloved for her sake, and not because I somehow get
something out of it. (This can be true whether my concern with my beloved is merely instrumental to my good or whether it is partly constitutive of my good.) but he thinks that Whiting and Soble fail to acknowledge the truth in the union view. He thinks that as humans, we are social creatures and love is " one  profound mode of that "sociality"  and that the union view makes sense of that "sociality" : sometimes, we identify ourselves with others and we recognize our interdependence upon and with each other,  understanding by "interdependence" not as Singer (1994, p. 165) suggests, as "a kind of reciprocal benevolence and respect" but rather as a way of making us who we are as persons to be constituted in part by those we love (cf., e.g., Rorty The Historicity of Psychological Attitudes: Love is Not Love Which Alters Not When It Alteration Finds”, in Badhwar (1993), 73–88.1986/1993; M Nussbaum  “Love and the Individual: Romantic Rightness and Platonic Aspiration”, in Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature,  314–34.1990).

Along these lines, M A Friedman (What Are Friends For? Feminist Perspectives on Personal Relationships and Moral Theory,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]" If 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. But Helm thinks that even so, if the "we" of Nozick  is understood as a third entity, we still need "a clearer
account than has been given of its ontological status and how it comes to be."

Gibran on Love. 2

Yesterday was an extremely busy day. I had to work until almost 8 p.m. and then I had to have dinner with my relatives. I did not have much time. So I just picked up a small book. It was a real pocket book:  4 by 6 inches. It's called "The Little Book of Love". I opened it at random. The following is what I found.

Yesterday I stood at the temple door interrogating the passers-by about the mystery and merit of Love.

And before me passed an old man with an emaciated and melancholy face, who sighed and said: "Love is a natural weakness bestowed upon us by the first man."

But a virile youth retorted:" Love joins our present with the past and the future."

Then a woman with a tragic face sighed and said: "Love is a deadly poison injected by black vipers, that crawl from the caves of hell. The poison seems fresh as dew and the thirtsy soul eagerly drinks it, but after the first intoxication the drinker sickens and dies a slow death."

Then a beautiful, rosy-cheeked damsel smilingly said: "Love is a wine served by the brides of Dawn which strengthens strong souls and enables them to ascend to the stars."

After her a black-robed, bearded man, frowning said: "Love is blind ignorance with which youth begins and ends."

Another, smiling, declared: "Love is a divine knowledge that enables men to see as much as the gods."

Then said a blind man, feeling his way with a cane: "Love is a blinding mist that keeps the soul from discerning the secret of existence, so that the heart sees only trembling phantoms of desire among the hills, and hears only echoes of cries from vociceless valleys."

A young man, playing on his viol, sang: "Love is a magic ray emitted from the burning core of the soul and illuminating the surrounding earth. It enables us to perceive Life as a beautiful dream between one awakening and another."

And a feeble ancient, dragging his feet like two rags, said, in quavering tones: "Love is the rest of the body in the quiet of the grave, the tranquility of the soul in the depth of Eternity."

And a five-year-old child, after him, said laughing: "Love is my father and my mother, and no one knows Love save my father and mother."

And so, all who passed spoke of Love as the image of their hopes and frustrations, leaving it a mystery as before.

Then I heard a voice within the temple: "Life is divided into two halves, one frozen, the other aflame; the burning half is Love."

                                                                     from Thoughts and Meditations

Is love as Gibran said, the image of people's hopes and frustrations or a mixture of fire and ice? What is your version, your understanding of this mysterious and yet endlessly fascinating emotion?

 

Gibran on the mysteries of Love

There is no word in this world which is used and abused more than the word 'love". Pop song composers write little except love" : being in love, falling out of love, longing for love, regretting the passing of love, finding love etc. Poets are not much better, though they use the word less or more obliguely. The word appears on the lips of every preacher, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu, or Buddhist. What does Khalil Gibran think about it?  I can do no better than let him speak for himself through the mouths of various characters he invented.

"Yesterday I found myself on the steps of the Temple questioning passers-by about the mysteries and merits of Love.

An old man with a worn and melancholy face replied to me, " Love is a natural weakness which was bequeathed to us by the first man,"

And a healthy young man said to me: "Love links our present to the roots of our past and to the dome of our future."

Then there came a woman with a tragic face who told me with a sigh: "Love is a mortal poison injected by black vipers from the caverns of Hell. This poison seems as cool as the dew and the thirsty soul drinks great mouthfuls of it. But once he is intoxicated with it, the drinker will be overcome with languors and will die a painful death."

And a young girl with rosy cheeks and joyful eyes replied to me:" Love is wine served by the betrothed of the dawn. it strengthens firm souls and allows them to rise up to the stars."

Then I questioned two bearded men wearing black robes. One told me, knitting his brow: "Love is the blind ignorance in which youth begins and ends."

And the other, with a smile on his lips, replied: "Love is a divine knowledge which allows man to see what the gods see."

Then a blind man seeking his way with the tip of his cane said to me: "Love is a blinding fog which prevents the soul from discerning the secret of existence, in such a way that the heart no longer sees in the hills anything more than the trembling phantoms of desire and no longer hears anything beyond the echoes of weeping from the silent valleys."

And a decrepit old man said to me in a quavering voice:" Love is the repose of the body in the silences of the tomb, the tranquility of the soul, and the depths of eternity."

And the child of five accompanied by his parents said to me, laughingly, "Love is my father and my mother, and they are the only ones who know what it is."

And so each passer-by evoked love as the reflection of his hopes and frustrations; and the mystery still remained obscure."

Love therefore is all things to all people, according to their age, sex, occupation, personal experience, hopes and frustrations. This may well be question we have to ask ourselves until our dying day and find that we are no nearer to finding out what it is though we shall have plenty of opportunities before then of finding out what it is not. But that does not and will not stop us from finding out more and more about what it can mean. We do not have much choice, if we want to live as we should, in what we believe to be love.

Some thoughts on Love

I don't think there is a topic in human civilization on which more has been written than the concept of love. Song writers, poets, novelists, dramatists, psychologists, philosophers and even theologians, spiritual wirters have all written about it. The word is on the mind of teenage girls, boys all the time, and may be on the mind of women, men (perhaps more on the mind and hearts of girls and women than on those of boys and men) though slightly less often. No one has not thought about it at one time or another in his or her life. Everyone is affected by it, whether they have it or whether they lack it. All kinds of problems arise because of erroneous or misunderstanding of what that word means and how one is to deal with this most powerful and most complex of all human emotions at different stages of one's life and as a result cause  themselves far more misery than need be. What is love? I try to find out. I consulted the Wikipedia. Here's what I found.

Love is first of all an emotion of strong affection and personal attachment. Philosophically, love is a virtue which involves kindness, compassion and affection and religiously, it is not just a virtue but forms the basis of all being ( God is love) and is the foundation of all divine law (the golden rule: " do unto others whatever it is that you would have others do unto you".)

Love can refer to a variety of feeling states and attitudes like pleasure or appetite (love of things like chocolates, flowers and all related in one way or another to our senses like sight, sound, smell, taste, touch) or attachment and commitment to and identification with an object, principle or goal (philia) or to intense interpersonal attraction ( I love my husband, wife, lover). It may involve a passionate and intense romantic attraction or attachment to the object of one's love and at its height, may involve sexual desire for physical intimacy and union(eros) in which we long to possess the object of our love. In less intense form, it may also involve emotional closeness eg. love of our fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters or storge (familial love) in which case, the desire for physical possession is absent but the desire for emotional possession or attachment may sometimes still be quite strong. Then there may be a more disinterested form of love called Platonic love (arete) which defines the kind of love which may exist between friends or philia and in an extreme case to the kind of impersonal love which extends to everyone and everything in the world  or agape eg. the love of St. Francis of Assisi for Nature and everything in it, its plants, its animals, birds, fishes and all other creatures, the great love or compassion of the Buddha for all sentient beings.  This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to define, even compared to other emotional states. Therefore when we talk about love, we may mean some one or more of such different kinds of loves. 

As our ancestors and we ourselves are animals, it is impossible to consider love without taking a look at our body and examine the chemical and physiological basis of love. As mammals, we have certain drives like hunger, thirst, mating. Brain scan studies show that when infatuated by love, people's brain show the kind of activity pattern that we find also in the mentally sick ie. confused. Love creates activity in the same area of the brain where hunger, thirst, and drug cravings create activity. New love, therefore, could possibly be more physical than emotional. Over time, this reaction to love mellows, and different areas of the brain are activated, primarily ones involving long-term commitments. Helen Fisher thus analyzes the experience of erotic love into three overlapping stages: lust, attraction and attachment. Lust exposes people to others; romantic attraction encourages people to focus their energy on mating; and attachment can involve tolerating and caring (caritas) for the spouse (or indeed the children) long enough to rear the children from birth to adulthood. 

In the lustful stage, which is the first stage, there is a sudden increased release of hormones such as testosterone for men and estrogen for women which make us feel attracted to the object of our physical and romantic love, usually a member of the opposite sex. The biological object for the release of such chemical is to promote, encourage and facilitate the ultimate evolutionary objective of mating and procreation These effects rarely last more than a few weeks or months. Attraction is a more individualised desire for a particular member of the oppoiste sex as the object of our eventual mating and develops out of the initial lustful desire and expresses itself as a commitment and attachment to a specific target of our physical and then emotional attachment. When people are in the stage of we normally describe as "falling in love", there is an increased and persistent secretion of such hormones within the brain of hormones such as pheromones, dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin which acts more or less like amphetamine, which stimulate the brain's own pleasure centre, the physiological effects of which may be increased heart beat, loss of appetite, insomnia, an intense feeling of muscular tension. Research indicates that this state may generally last from one and a half to three years. 

To ensure that our attraction will last so as to increase the chance of mating and procreation, we develop emotional attachment to the specific target of our physical love. Such attachment bonds us to the object of our "love" in a kind of emotional relationship which may last many years and even decades. Such attachment is generally manifiested by an open public declaration and acknowledgement of our desire for long term commitments such as engagement, and then marriage and taking up the responsibility of raising the children of this union of love. Such attachment may be facilitated if the parties share certain common interest, hobbies, sports, likes and dislikes. It has been linked to higher levels of the chemicals like oxytocin (which encourages caring and nurturing behavior) and vasopressein to a greater degree than short-term relationships have.Enzo Emmnuele and others have shown that when people fall in love, they show higher levels of certain protein molecules known as the nerve growth factor (NGF) which may revert to their former level after a year or so.

Main article: Chemical basis for love

Simplified overview of the chemical basis of love.

Although it is sometimes said that "love" is an international language, different words have been used by different cultures to describe the kind of feelings we refer to as "love" and such words may overlap in what they mean in different contexts, even within the same culture, the meaning of the word "love" may also have undergone changes. Thus the modern conception of romantic or courtly love dates from the Middle Ages although there is also evidence of its existence even earlier in the form of ancient love poetry. Although love usually refers to love of another person, it may also refer to love of the self in narcissism. It is thus difficult to give a universal defintion of love. But whilst the word cannot be defined positively in a fashion applicable to all places and at all times, it is possible to define it negatively by saying what it is not. As a general expression of positive sentiment (a stronger form of like), love is commonly contrasted with hatred or apathy or indifference and may further be contrasted with lust which connotes a more purely physical sexual craving more like appeitite for food than the caring, intimacy, sharing, and bonding, commitment which accompany romantic love and also different from the close relationship between friends which normally lack of any desire for any overt sexual intimacy.

 

Two hands forming the outline of a heart shape.

 

Different people have emphasized different aspects of love thus Virgil says that "love conquers all", the Beatles say that "all you need is love"; St. Thomas Aquinas, following Aristotle, says that to love is "to will the good of another" and Bertrand Russell thinks of love as an absolute not a relative value and Leibnitz says that to love is "to be delighted by the happiness of another."

In the past, the people who have reflected most on the concept of love are poets, writers, theologians and philosophers. Originally, people thought of love as caused by attraction of opposites. But social scientists have found that whilst it may have some biological basis in that in certain immune systems, it is found that people with the most diverse immune systems (orthogonal immune system) tend to like each other more but in general, people like mates who are similar to themselves and physical availability and proximity play much more important roles in mate seleciton than were previously thought. Great advances in our understanding of the nature and function of love have been made in the last century by evolutionary biologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists and psychologists, social or individual. Therefore we now have various theories or models of love. Robert Sternberg, a noted psychologist, thinks that all love have three components in his triangular theory of love:  intimacy (two people sharing intimate personal details about their lives, likes, dislikes, history etc usually present in romantic love and friendship), commitment (both expecting the relationship to last for a substantial period of time or until death), passion ( sexual attaction and desire for physical intimacy eg. in infatuation and romantic love). All forms of love consists merely of these three elements in different combination and strength. The American psychologist Zick Rubin, however, defines love through his psychometrics with three elements of attachment, caring, and intimacy. M Scott Peck (The Road Less Travelled) thinks that love has two elements: altruism and narcissism and that love is "concern for the spiritual growth of another" and that love is more an activity than a feeling. And other psychologists have found that all forms of longer term emotional relationship like attachment, bonding, trust, commitment etc. are modelled basically on the primary relationship between the mother and the child during infancy fist explored by John Bowlby.

Thus love is an emotion having biological, hormonal, psychological, social and cultural bases. It is therefore impossible to completely understand this complex emotion without taking into account all the relevant factors. Of course, the above is only an extremely simplified and schematic description of love. In practice, love is much much more complex because of differences in the sexual orientation, family upbringing, education, exposure to different kinds of role models, the intricacies of personal pyschology and even the day to day level of hormones, especially in the case of women whose emotions and moods may undergo violent up or down swings according to the time of the month or whether they are in teenage, maturity, menopause etc. But it provides a relatively sound framework against which the intricate details of personal psychology may be viewed and analyzed.