Concept
Love
Overview
Love encompasses a range of strong and positive emotional and mental states, from the most sublime virtue or good habit, the deepest interpersonal affection, to the simplest pleasure. An example of this range of meanings is that the love of a mother differs from the love of a spouse, which differs from the love for food. Most commonly, love refers to a feeling of strong attraction and emotional attachment.
Love is considered to be both positive and negative, with its virtue representing human kindness, compassion, and affection—"the unselfish, loyal and benevolent concern for the good of another"—and its vice representing a human moral flaw akin to vanity, selfishness, amour-propre, and egotism, potentially leading people into a type of mania, obsessiveness, or codependency. It may also describe compassionate and affectionate actions towards other humans, oneself, or animals. In its various forms, love acts as a major facilitator of interpersonal relationships and, owing to its central psychological importance, is one of the most common themes in the creative arts. Love has been postulated to be a function that keeps human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species.
Ancient Greek philosophers identified six forms of love: familial love (storge), friendly love or platonic love (philia), romantic love (eros), self-love (philautia), guest love (xenia), and divine or unconditional love (agape). Modern authors have distinguished further varieties of love: unrequited love, empty love, companionate love, consummate love, infatuated love, amour de soi, and courtly love. Numerous cultures have also distinguished Ren, Yuanfen, Mamihlapinatapai, Cafuné, Kama, Bhakti, Mettā, Ishq, Chesed, Amore, Charity, Saudade (and other variants or symbioses of these states), as culturally unique words, definitions, or expressions of love in regard to specified "moments" currently lacking in the English language.
The color wheel theory of love defines three primary, three secondary, and nine tertiary love styles, describing them in terms of the traditional color wheel. The triangular theory of love suggests intimacy, passion, and commitment are core components of love. Love has additional religious or spiritual meaning. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Love is discussed.
For self-love is no love; so if God’s self is love, that which he loves must be defect of love; just as a luminary can light up only that which otherwise would be dark. Henry James, the Swedenborgian, says: “It is no doubt very tolerable finite or creaturely love to love one’s own in another, to love another for his conformity to one’s self: but nothing can be in more flagrant…
Charles S. Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; the book is about it; opens on it
Even in its caprices the usage of language remains true to some kind of reality. Thus it gives the name of 'love' to a great many kinds of emotional relationship which we too group together theoretically as love; but then again it feels a doubt whether this love is real, true, actual love, and so hints at a whole scale of possibilities within the range of the phenomena of love. We shall have no difficulty in making…
Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and The Analysis of The Ego
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is
And as the heat of the Sun is more powerful when it emerges from clouds and after mist, so Love is sweeter and hotter after a jealous tiff with the loved one,[124] and moreover, as some think the Sun is kindled and extinguished, so also do people conceive of Love as mortal and uncertain. Moreover, just as without training the body cannot easily bear the heat of the Sun, so neither can the untrained soul easily bear…
Plutarch, Plutarch's Morals
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
Experience tells us that he who loves loves the things connected with his beloved. Therefore another sure sign of God’s love is the love of his creatures who are created by and are dependent on him; for he who loves an author or poet, will he not love his work or poem? But this stage is reached when the lover’s heart is immersed in love and the more he is absorbed in Him, the more will he love His creatures, so much…
Ghazzali, Some religious and moral teachings of Al-Ghazzali
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
This I comprehend very well as in the nature of a hypothesis correlating life and death. But, if love is to be merely by way of hypothesis, why, then lovers lay themselves open to ridicule through their actually falling in love. If, however, love is something real, why, then reality must bear out what lovers say about it. But did one in real life ever hear of, or observe, such things having taken place, even if…
Søren Kierkegaard, Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard
names the idea; states what it is; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Love
- Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)
- Sage (philosophy)
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Beyond Good and Evil
- Max Scheler
- Empedocles
- Jean-Luc Marion
- Robert C. Solomon
- Heloise
- Byung-Chul Han
- Hatata
- Alenka Zupančič
- Aloisio Galea
Related ideas
- Bhagavata Purana
- Jesus
- Feminism
- First Epistle to the Corinthians
- Greek language
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Gospel of John
- Hebrew language
- Hinduism
- Homer
- Kama
- Vice
- India
- Vedas
- Japanese language
- Agape
- Rumi
- Karnataka
- Bhakti
- Latin
- Latin literature
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
- Middle Ages
- Birth control
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Aesthetics.