6/13/2007 Love At First Sight: What Is Love?

6/13/2007 Love At First Sight: What Is Love?

Okay, so I have now eliminated the idea of soul-mates. I have analyzed the attraction between two people and discovered reasons. I have explained how a profound attraction can exist without words or experience. I have determined us as a species to be pleasure seekers. But before I get into pleasure seeking, I want to answer one question that needs to be answered in any discussion on love at first sight. What is love?

Let's reject out of hand that God sends us love from up above. Yes, it feels sublime, but c'mon. This isn't the dark ages. We don't need our imaginations dictated to us by Latin speaking pederasts. Let's also agree note to utter the words, “Love is what you believe it is.” Or, “Love exists if you believe in it.” Such pluralistic platitudes should certainly be a part of a mechanism that immediately robs the writer of the blog they are using to inflict such banalities on the world. So with that in mind...

Love Is...

It was the with the Ancient Hebrews that the idea of universal justice and the idea that all beings have access to God first appears. This made for a nice little merger with Plato's soul-mates idea. This makes for a nice little religion in our modern day. After all, we all can't be rich. Most of us will spend much of our lives being exploited by the rich and by our government. Most of us will have little pleasure in our lives. We will suffer all the agonies of a cruel God: cancer. Aids. Getting old. Arthritis. Broken bones. Alzheimer's. What will there be to live for? The compassion of others? Those moments when we can give love to each other? But when others are so willing to hurt and exploit, what terms can we set to make sure we find compassion without getting hurt? Soul-mates. That's the idea. Find your soul-mate and live for your family. Right?

In my last post, I concluded that not everyone has a soul-mate. I think we can throw out all of the ideas of universal justice and equal access to God. In our modern society, the idea of soul-mates and living for family takes on the scent of a fairy-tale. Who hurts us more than the ones we love? Do we believe that we will be safe with our soul-mate? Do serial killers have soul-mates? And if so, wouldn't they naturally kill their soul-mates? And wouldn't their soul-mates then want to be killed? If the truth of the soul must manifest itself on the physical plane, then don't these things follow?

No, they don't. Because all of this is a construction that serves to promise us pleasure and protect us from pain. If it doesn't serve that purpose, it isn't constructed. It's not about something making sense, or about a set of rules to live by. It's about what gives us pleasure.

Inventing Love...

I'll tell a story I've told before. One time a co-worker told me he didn't believe in love. I asked what he meant, and he said, “Love is an invention.” I told him that if love was an invention, it must be real. He said he never thought of it that way. I think that it's an unfortunate truth that a lot of men see their relationships that way. Most men, after all, don't know the first thing about pleasing a women. Many men feel so lucky to just get a women that when she decides she wants to marry him, he concedes rather than lose her. But he always resents her, because as far as he's concerned, he settled for her. Our perception of ourselves and our desires shape our view of our life.

But “Love” is in the ghost, not the machine, isn't it? If we believe it is true, then it is. Love is first and foremost a feeling, not necessarily an emotion, but a feeling. And as a feeling, if we feel it, than it is true. But is love nothing more than a feeling?

History Of Love

Our modern day concept of love first appeared in history during the medieval period, sung to the ladies of the court by troubadours. They sang of love that “lasts forever”. Love that “is meant to be”. Are all of these things truth? Some of this must exist on the physical plane, right? If the soul split in heaven, it must have done so in reality. In some place we could see if we were God, or chosen by him. So is love dependent on belief in God? Is love an empirical belief?

Okay, lets go a step further. We realize, now, in our postmodern society that there is no physical plane. It is all a function of our imagination. Our eyes are poets. So if we believe in love, than love is real, right? But doesn't that also mean if we don't believe in love, then it's not real? And what if some of us believe in love, and some of us don't? Okay, so this is all serving to confuse the issue, and I am not going to write and ode to the paralysis of analysis. This article will determine once and for all whether or not romantic love exists. So we have to assert some conclusions.

Blasting Through Pluralism

What is the definition of love? In our modern pluralist society, we accept all kinds of different forms or definitions of love. But for our purposes, let's define love as that which the troubadours sang about. The idea of two souls, united forever, destined to love one another. This is the idea of love that exists in America, though not all of us believe it. Not all of us believe anything. This idea of love is why we marry today. This is what we decide to believe in or not. This is the standard. So this is what love is.

IS it real? Oh, great! Now we have to define what it means for something to be real. That shouldn't be to hard...sigh. Alright... since I have already decided that the physical world is just another aspect of the imagination, is anything we can imagine real? No, there are things we “tag” as being real, and things we “tag” as being unreal. A dream, for example, is imagined but not real. The computer you are using to read this is real. Then there are things we are not as certain about. Like God. The inability to define God as real largely has to do with social proof. If everyone in society believed in God, we would regard him as real. But would that make him real? God as the tree in the forest...

But let's go even a step further. Why do we deem some things real and others not real? Certainly the method of coming about an idea or image has something to do with it. If we see something, we tend to regard it as real. But if others see the same thing differently, then again, it confuses us. Is social proof required to deem something real? In truth, we all have different reasons for deeming something real or not. Just like we all have different opinions on love, most of the banal. Again, our pluralism interferes with any attempt at certainty. But I am not here to celebrate differences or spit out platitudes.

Denial Of Reason

So let's go even deeper. We all deem different things to be real. We all have different reasons why. So why am I going over the reasons? Reasons, you see, are ornaments. We hang them because they look good; they have nothing to do with actual function. The real reason we believe something has nothing to do with what we say it does. What does, then, have to do with Actual function?

Let me explain a bit. In his book about the mind, “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial Of Human Nature”, Steven Pinker relates an experiment performed on people who have had the connection between the left and right hemispheres of the brain severed. The patient was shown a sign in his right eye, placed carefully where his left eye could not see. The left eye corresponds to the left side of the brain, the right eye to the right. The sign said get up and walk. When the patient was shown the sign, they would get up and walk, like the sign told them. But when they were asked why, they would answer, “Because I wanted a coke.” The left side of the brain came up with a reason because it didn't know why it did what it did.

Follow Your Heart...Or Eat It Out

So common today to say that, “Follow your heart.” In matters of love, how utterly ignorant. After all, reason is what we tell ourselves so that we can live with our desires. And then isn't love reason? Love is a subset of logic. After all, love is a story, isn't it? The one told by Plato and the troubadours? So often, “Go with your heart” is an excuse to go with your body. But love unlocks the desires. In a society where we at least pretend to mate with one person for life, the logical aspects of your mate are of the utmost importance. Who, after all, is going to dedicate their whole life to you, even when you are old dying? You can't know the future with your emotions. You can know with the mind.

Back To Reality...

So reasons are to be set aside. They are what we tell ourselves so we can live with ourselves. They are not the cause of the effect. What is important is motivation.

Notice I used reason to eliminate reason. If you are not part of it already, welcome to Postmodern America.

We believe it because we get pleasure from it, or because it protects us from pain. Our reality is based on need. We all see what we want to see.

We can know our mind with our mind. But we cannot determine what is real with reason. So what is real? In the realm of our imagination, we tab some things real and not real. Reason for this is not logical, or rather, logic does not enlighten us as to why.

In a world where there is no difference between the real and the imagined, is love real? If there is no reason to tab something real or not real, how can we ever know if anything is real, much less love?

The answer is action. If motivation is what is the operative criterion, then we can only truly discern motive by intuiting from action. And we all love. Most all of us get married at one point if not more. We all want to mate for life, at least until we get to know our mate. We listen to love songs constantly, we expect love and we expect others to love. Of the things in the world that give us pleasure, love is the most important motivation of a human being in this society today, far outstripping God or duty. In a post-modern society, what could be more important than the pleasure of love?

Now I must go into my room and lash myself for writing something life-affirming. But before I do I must impress upon you that not everyone has a soul-mate. Many of us are somewhat cursed in that we all possess the ability to love who possesses the ability to reason. But many of us do not have a soul-mate, and are therefore cursed to wander and live in want.

I should say before going on that I never did believe in evolution. It is the tendency of our minds to try to make sense of itself. But the world we analyze is, again, only illusion. We are not the product of hundreds of years of evolution, we are the products of our minds. All of the issues of evolutionary psychology are also issues in the present, and our minds are capable of more than we can currently imagine. Mating is about defense, about establishing a status through our associations. And while I generally identify two root motivations for all humans, safety and pleasure, one is a subset of the other.

So there are two important points to take from this post. One, love is a story that clears away fear to experience the pleasure of as much romance, compassion and arousal as we have the imagination to muster. We often make a distinction between love, which includes compassion and commitment, and sexual pleasure, which does not. But love, too, is about pleasure, a found set of terms that rationalizes and enables more pleasure than mere copulation. And two, our pluralistic values allow love to be real even when it is perverse. Subversive love is up next. First, I will go over a list of women that I would like to marry. That, I assure you, will segue nicely into subversive love. Hide the children.