Defining Love

Love has always proved challenging to define precisely in philosophical discourse. We say we “love” chocolate, hobbies, pets, friends, and romantic partners, but these seem to be different kinds of love. What unifies these varying usages of “love”? Philosophers have proposed that love centrally involves:

• Valuing or appraising the beloved
• An emotional orientation toward the beloved
• Caring for the beloved’s wellbeing
• Intimate knowledge of the beloved’s particular traits
• Desiring union, closeness, or bondedness with the beloved

Philosophers distinguish between love directed at persons versus non-persons, as well as between romantic/sexual love and non-romantic love like friendship. But even focusing just on interpersonal love, discrepancies remain between philosophical conceptions of what factors are most essential to love.

Historical Perspectives

Ancient Greek Views

The ancient Greeks made seminal contributions to the philosophy of love.

Plato distinguished eros, passionate longing typically directed at beauty, from philia, virtuous friendship bound by mutual goodwill. He considered philia superior because eros could become a harmful obsession rooted in superficial attraction, while philia represented a spiritual bond between souls seeking wisdom and the Good.

Aristotle elaborated on philia as either utility-based or centered on valuing the friend’s character. He described friendships of pleasure, friendships of use, and perfect friendships between virtuous equals who wish each other well for each other’s sake.

The Stoics viewed emotions like erotic passion as disturbances of reason to be suppressed through mental discipline. Love and friendship were permissible only insofar as they were rational. Excessive attachment to anything finite was seen as morally dangerous.

Christianity’s Influence

Medieval philosophy was deeply influenced by Christianity.

St. Augustine held that properly ordered love seeks union with God above all finite things. He described rightly directed love as promoting spiritual peace, rooted in God’s love. Augustine believed using others merely as means to self-gratification was tantamount to sin.

St. Thomas Aquinas saw love as intricately interwoven with the will and intellect. He distinguished between amor concupiscentiae, desire for the beloved’s traits, and amor benevolentiae, goodwill seeking the beloved’s objective flourishing. The latter reflects divine love.

For both Augustine and Aquinas, love for God should shape our practical reasoning and behavior. Earthly relationships required careful moral modulation to avoid becoming disordered or idolatrous.

Romantic and Modern Perspectives

In his famous work The Symposium, Renaissance thinker Marsilio Ficino revived Platonic idealization of eros while integrating Christian and Neoplatonist strands into a transcendent, spiritual view of love’s power to forge a bond with the divine.

Romanticism later celebrated erotic passion for individuals as a path to meaning and self-realization. Philosophers like Søren Kierkegaard emphasized subjective passion over reason in love and critiqued idealization of ancient Greek conceptions of friendship.

Modern philosophy continued analyzing love’s cognitive and volitional dimensions. Descartes discerned three primitive passions – love, hatred, and desire. Spinoza viewed love and hate as joy and sadness bound with an external cause.

Hume and later psychologists saw love as a complex emotional state, not fundamentally rational. Kant conceived of love as rational goodwill seeking the happiness of others for their own sake as ends-in-themselves.

Contemporary Analyses

Contemporary perspectives on love vary greatly. A few examples:

• Irving Singer views love as valuing the beloved for their own sake, not for utility.
• Pragmatist thinkers deny love involves anything beyond emotional attachment and practical caregiving.
• Analytic philosophers focus on parsing love into components like affection, appraisal, attachment.
• Narrower accounts analyze philia as goodwill, agape as universal benevolence, eros as passionate intimacy.
• Some feminists critique idealized notions of romantic love as rationalizing gender inequality.

Overall, analytic philosophy tends to emphasize conceptual clarity and argumentative rigor over experiential and spiritual dimensions of love present in continental approaches.

Key Questions

• Is love essentially rational, irrational, or arational?
• Does love allow for impartial moral reasoning?
• How essential are emotions to love?
• Is love voluntary or involuntary?
• How does love shape personal identity?
• What is love’s connection to the good life?

Ethical Complexities

Philosophical puzzles also arise concerning love’s ethical implications:

• Can love excuse otherwise unethical partiality toward loved ones?
• How does one balance obligations to loved ones versus strangers?
• Is self-love required to properly love others?
• When is it acceptable to cease loving someone?
• Does romantic love inherently compromise autonomy?

Overall, philosophers continue to probe love’s paradoxical nature – subjective yet universal, irrational yet potentially moral, voluntary yet unbidden. Examining love philosophically sheds light on this foundational human concern.

Conclusion

From Plato to the present, the nature of love has transfixed and perplexed philosophers. Debates continue regarding how to define love, whether it is rational, how it shapes identity, and its ethical implications. Philosophical inquiry into love encompasses intersecting questions of ontology, ethics, emotion, motivation, and human nature. While a comprehensive understanding of love remains elusive, philosophical analysis clarifies this primal phenomenon that so impacts human existence.