So to recap we have introduced in the last post the question: what is love?
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Let me just make this though – I do not personally hold the belief that love is sex. I utilize that argument to get people to philosophically think about romantic love – and better yet it makes for some entertaining and interesting conversations. If you want to know what I personally believe on the topic of love then you should ask me in person and start this conversation. If you are looking for refutations for the argument from last post then you should come up with your own and post them to get a response - no handouts!
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Personally I have recently spent three to four weeks intensely meditating on this question. I researched articles online, read various philosophical texts on the subject, looked back on previous relationships, and asked friends who have been in love. After all these investigations I then began to engage in time-consuming and fascinating conversations with friends around me to find out what people really thought about this thing called love. I’ve discovered in my weeks of dedicated searching some really compelling answers to the question and have come away with many different ways of looking at what we call romantic love.
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What sparked this journey is another story altogether. The bottom line is that love certainly seems to be an incredibly significant focus of our lives and so we ought not to be ignorant about the subject of such things.
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So I will post sections of conversations to represent my journey investigating romantic love.
This is the essential outline for the conversations that took place during these weeks:
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Every conversation I started began with these three question:
- Have you ever been in love?
- Do you know what love is?
- What is love?
Questions one and two are set up in a way to make my conversation partner consistent with his or her beliefs in a subtle way. If you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the first question then you must necessarily know what love is to some extent in order to know that you have or have not been in love. If you answer ‘I don’t know’ then the conversation takes a completely different turn. It is as if I asked “have you ever eaten an apple?” - It must necessarily be the case that to answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ with certainty you must know what an apple is.
At the turn of question three I suggest that in forming answers we ought not to go about our discussion describing what love is like, or how it feels, or the process that happens between people in love, or even just talking about how good or important love is, or even the proper way of acting in a relationship, I direct the conversation to a definition of what it is that we are talking about. This is absolutely crucial for understanding each other when we use the word love – to prevent making equivocations. I suggest we come to define love as a genus and species.
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So I suggest first of all, before we get to the definition, that love must be some kind of idea or concept such that we are even able to talk about it or bring it up in the first place, and that idea must be about something – the true nature of love. In the same way I can talk about the idea of an apple, but that idea is only referential to what apples really are – apples as they exist. The concept of love isn’t really what we are after, but obviously the true nature of love. This is a distinction for the purpose of narrowing the subject of the conversation, and I’m not really trying to make any broad metaphysical claims here.
Now before I give the conversation back over to my partner to answer question three I want to offer some examples of the kinds of things love might be so that we can get an idea what I mean when I ask for a genus – the first part of our definition. I suggest that love must be the kind of thing that exists with regards to us in some way or another – that love is available to us – that love happens to us - this is obviously the case. What I mean is that love must inhere in either our mind or our body (or our soul – that isn’t left out as a possibility). If it were the case that love happens only in the body then love must be something entirely physical, which doesn't seem to be the case. Love then must be available to our mind (or soul) or else love doesn't exist to us at all – love would be imperceptible. This is where we ought to begin in definition - where we should first begin looking for a genus.
What kinds of things are available to our mind? I offer some examples – these things which love may or may not be a kind: a state of mind, a feeling, an emotion, an action, a thought, a unity, a desire, a compulsion, a process, an ordering of the soul, an act of will, a connection, a collection of any of the above, etc. This is just a helpful starting point to understand the notion of genus as it pertains to the subject of our conversation.
So I ask again question three “What is love?” and suggest we begin with “What is the genus of love?”
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This is the very first stage of my conversations and so now I pose these very questions to you.
(to be continued)
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LORD RAVEN
LORD OF THE SKIES
