I have a lot of difficulty understanding the popular idea of love as between two people who would like to be with each other (and will probably end up marrying each other) because they ‘love’ each other.
The general platform from which I start exploring this topic, which is a typically Eastern/ spiritual philosophy, makes me conclude that love between 2 specific persons is a consequence of man’s ego because if a man is a ‘perfect’ man he will love every living thing equally.
However, i intuitively believe in the concept of love at first sight. This leads me to an unresolved conflict of opinions.
Can anyone clear the air?
Please excuse my language: i am not formally trained in philosophy.
BTW, ‘love at first sight’ is lust. You can’t love someone you don’t yet know, you can only feel desire. And it can take quite some time when you’re with a person to stop projecting upon him or her your own views of the ideal. Especially if the sex is good, lol.
When you do stop, it’s commonly referred to as ‘the honeymoon’s over’. Then you either work at developing ‘real’ love or you hang on and take up a hobby or you move on to the next rush.
Trying to understand Love from the perspective of philosophy, or even Jungian psychology, is like trying to understand biological genetics by reading Aristotle.
If you want to understand Love (at least, as much of it as can currently be understood), you want to study contemporary psychology, neurobiology, and evolutionary psychology.
I can’t recommend a better book than Robert Wright’s “The Moral Animal” if you want to understand love. He doesn’t pretend to know everything, but he explains certain things we’ve all seen with such clarity, all from an evolutionary perspective. It’s a brilliant book, and also well-written and easy to read.
I had a strange experience last night that I wanted to get off my chest, maybe it has something to do with love, I’m not sure.
I have been travelling to Bangkok on business; maybe once or twice a month since the New Year.
On my first trip there this year, I met a bar-girl, who we’ll call Tone. I found her down right comely and didn’t hesitate to get up and walk away from some other girl I was sitting with at the bar and had been with the evening before.
Slanty oriental eyes, angular face, little nose, freckles on nearly black Isaan skin, long black hair; 26, standing up to about my throat, little square white teeth, little hands and feet and no pock marks or stretch marks or tatoos or piercings or any of the other things that ruin a young woman’s beauty.
Tone’s a little older than the women I generally go for, (nineteen-year-olds), but something about her is very attractive despite her being 26.
I go with her a couple times a week when I was in Bangkok, giving her a thousand Baht more than she asked for. I never let her spend the night, never took her to dinner, never bought her anything; really never spoke to her: my Thai is not very good, and besides I don’t want to know her --how can you gag a girl you know, cum in her face, be sadistic?
A month ago I go to the bar I found her at, but she isn’t there. Her friend who I do talk to, as she can speak some Korean, tells me that Tone wants to have a baby with me and come to Manila. I figure she’s putting me on for a long con (Jesus, I live in Manila, so I’m pretty aware about this game). The next afternoon I call Tone and everything is the same as always: lay together, take a shower, fuck, take a shower, suck, take a shower, pay, she goes. She asks, “why you never take me long-time? Two-thousand Baht, I don’t eat too much.” “I like to sleep alone” I tell her. She gives me a picture of herself taken in the bar.
At Songkran I have the bad luck of being in Bangkok again, (bad luck because it isn’t fun to me to spend the whole God damn day with damp trousers and ruined papers). Anyway, Tone asks me to go to her hometown to see her home and parents. I pass as I have to go to Saigon straight away and then back to Manila, and I don’t want to go up to fucking Isaan anyway.
I come back to Bangkok last night and go to the bar to look for Tone. She’s not there, but her friend who can speak Korean tells me she was crying when I left last time. I don’t really understand her over the music and I can’t really believe this very professional woman has been crying over me. Tone gets to the bar, but she’s acting a little strange. I don’t know what, another customer she has to stand up to go with me? it’s her ‘magic-day’? she’s sick? I don’t know.
I take her back to the hotel --and she balls her eyes out!
She cries and cries and cries. “You go bar to get another girl!” “You forget me!” “You didn’t say good-bye!” This is totally unexpected. She calms down in forty minutes. We shower and fuck and shower and shower and suck and shower. We have a conversation. Her English actually isn’t that bad. In four months of seeing her on and off, this is the first time I’ve really ever spoken to her.
But this will be my last trip to Bangkok for at least six months; maybe more, maybe a lot longer. Tone has no passport, she sends all her money back to Isaan --and what the fuck is she gonna do in Manila? Or rather, what the fuck am I gonna do with her in Manila where I got three girls on the go there anyway?
I agree with Ingenium that there is a big difference between love as a passion and love as “affection”. Aleister Crowley describes the first love thus:
"There is […] little indeed in common between Love and such tepid passions as regard, affection, or kindliness; it is the uninitiate, who, to his damnation in a hell of cabbage soup and soap-suds, confuses them.
"Love may best be defined as the passion of Hatred inflamed to the point of madness, when it takes refuge in Self-destruction.
“Love is clear-sighted with the lust of deadly rage, anatomizing its victim with keen energy, seeking where best to strike home mortally to the heart; it becomes blind only when its fury has completely overpowered it, and thrust it into the red maw of the furnace of self-immolation.”
[Little Essays toward Truth, Love.]
This is a very Nietzschean view, as Nietzsche defined (heterosexual) love as follows (saying that it was "the only definition worthy of a philosopher):
“Love: in its means, war, and at bottom, the deadly hatred of the sexes.”
The Greek word for this kind of love was eros, whence “erotic” etc. The Greek word for the coochy coochy version of love was agape.
“The love talked and written about so much in novels, poetry and magazines, the love of one’s neighbour, the universal love of the churches, love of humanity, has nothing whatsoever to do with “loveless love” (A-Mor, Without-Death), which is a harsh discipline, as cold as ice, as cutting as a sword, and which aspires to overcome the human condition in order to reach the Kingdom of the Immortals, Ultima Thule.”
[Carl Gustav Jung, in Miguel Serrano’s NOS.]