Philosophy of Love

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I was wondering maybe we could get a thread going where we could analize relationships and feelings, philosophycally.

Its been ten months since my last relationship - and the end was the biggest pathological event I’ve been experienced throughout my life. I had a very hard time getting over her, but I’ve been 100% for a while. To make long story short, we dated for two years and I developed really strong feelings for her, as Hegel would put it in “Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion”

“Love is a distinguishing of the two, who nevertheless are absolutely not distinguished for each other. The consciousness or feeling of the identity of the two - to be outside of myself and in the other, this is love. I have my self-consciousness not in myself but in the other. I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other”

So basically I lived through her. When we were about to go official, gossip was spread about me in her inner circle(which could be deadly within Northern Mexico’s elite), causing her family to question my motives(which I can assure you, were 100% noble). This causing us to go undercover, and after a week at a beach in southern texas - everything imploded. Her family found out, she denied here feelings for me, and after giving it a good fight I was left in emotional turmoil. That took a good 6 months of traveling around Mexico(I’ve always lived in Mexico), dropping out of college, and enjoying the exclusive carnal company of a number of members of the female variety - I finally forgot about her. And right now, could care less about the life she leads. Hope it is a happy one, but that’s it really.

I still find myself for the first time in my life - inspired, academically. But I happen to think that I’m never really going to feel the same way about someone again, which deeply saddens me - since I’m of the opinion that following Hegel - Love validates your life. If you have no Love you are basically fucked.

Now this is where I was getting to, using Plato…

Love resides metaphysically as an idea, and all we get is an appearence here in the apparent world. This is why it was so strong, and this is why it got ruined in such a dramatic fashion.

The moment metaphysic love became an appearance, it was subject to the real world’s failures. Unfounded gossip, economic woes, etc, etc.

This is using Plato, now using my man Hegel

Using hegel, the love me and said person shared embodied a World Spirit therefore becoming a totality. But, as my fate would have it - this beautiful world spirit would be swallowed by a much larger one called market forces, economic disparity, jealousy, innate insecurities, etc.

What do y’all think?

Maybe we can dissect this among other things.

Thanks for letting me in here!!

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It is not at all uncommon for us to live vicariously through females and fantasies (Hegels fantasies, for example)

Love of wisdom of love? That is what the title of your OP translates to. That is where you will find your answers; in your translations, in the forming of the experience of a response to your question.

Now what is the question?

“I was wondering if maybe we could get a thread going where we could analize relationships and feelings, philosophycally”.

There should have been a question mark at the end of the word “philosophically”. Such as:
I was wondering if maybe we could get a thread going where we could analize relationships and feelings philosophically?

You are asking a question. You are looking for a response, an answer to the question “can we get a thread going, philosophically? A thread where we could analize relationships and feelings?”

That’s a good question. A better question is; what is the value of this question? Why even ask this question? What is it that you seek? Do you seek the idealization/want? Or maybe the truth is what you seek? Do you seek nothing? Do you seek both? Do you seek not at all? Do you seek what has been lost? Do you seek the return of its passing away? Do you seek the validation that reflects your want?

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The very fact that you are writing about this tells me that you are not so over her as you might like to think. But so what? Shouldn’t a first significant love have her priviledged place in your memories?

Love, said Ambrose Bierce, was a disease curable by marriage. If he meant to make a point, for me it is that love is hardly ever, or normally, “until death do us apart”.Love is an ideal. How close with live to ideals is in doubt. But the worst that one can do, in my opinion, is to try to rationalize it, defangle it, domesticate it, because it robs it of it’s power and reality. Love is that butterfly in your stomach you get after a long separation from THIS person, or even when the light catches her hair in an unsual way, and you realize that you like that spark, that butterfly in your stomach in your life and that she is the one that inspires it. Love is such serious bussiness because when you find it you feel a different, better man and when you lose it, it puts into question your own self worth. But these are only the effects of the onset of love and it’s departure, not what love is. I try not to scrutinize it too much for fear that I will be then looking at the IDEA of Love and no longer at love itself, which for me, lives in moments and not in philosophical systems.

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You just blew my mind Omar

I think you are totally right

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A sufficient dose of reality is enough to cure even the most persistent happiness.

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that’s a great line

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A bit of a bump, but I found this topic interesting and thought that there was room for a lot more discussion and ideas.

I think that sick decedent is right when he says that living vicariously through a loved one is not uncommon. If you love someone, then you will inevitably care about what they do and the experiences they have, and as such your emotions will become linked with their life. Given that love of someone is likely to encompass admiring the way they live their life, it is not difficult to imagine how a vicarious fixation may develop.

Love seems to involve becoming emotionally invested and genuinely interested in the life of another. If we see a relationship where one or both of those involved does not care about the successes, failures, fears, ambitions etc. of the other, then it strikes us as cold and loveless. Comparatively, a relationship in which one is utterly consumed with the life of the other appears as if they have forgone their independence, and their clinging piggybacking is burdensome.

Regarding the Hegel quote, “I am satisfied and have peace with myself only in this other”, it follows that peace and happiness cannot be attained if ‘the other’ is restless, miserable and suffering. While they are a necessary component of our happiness, they need not – and ideally, ought not – be the only source of it. We can also find it in our friendships, work, the arts, activities etc. In other words: in the content of our own independent lives.

Love involves lives being entwined with each other, not lived through or found in another. Those in a relationship are still individuals, but their interests and emotions have become bound together.

As for satisfaction, that word sounds like it could be the death of passion and the onset of complacency and boredom. There is a thought in Kierkegaard: love is an infinite debt which we never stop seeking to repay. Love stirs effort in us. It leads us to act, and makes us want to improve ourselves and be as good as we can be.

Plenty of things – such as physical intimacy with those we do not love – merely paper over the gaping void of love lost, absent or unrequited. However, can we not find validation through loving endeavours of other kinds, such as an occupation or cause that we deem important?

The difficulties and obstacles of the real world are inevitable. Love conjures the effort and willpower to take them on; it conjures them to such an extent that tackling them is really no decision at all.

It is hard enough to establish whether love is present with all the problems the world throws at it. If everything was easy and there were never any tests for it to face, would the concept of love as we have it even make sense?

This is a good post. Seeking to understand love from a biological and psychological perspective can rob it of any special or mystical properties accorded to it. Love can be quite a lot like faith. We can know parts of the science behind it, but that does not stop us from submitting to it as if it were more than that.
The moments which you speak of are certainly powerful, but I do not think that love resides in them. Love is more like a continuous disposition, which those moments are glimpses of. You may be achingly aware of your love in a particular moment, but love was not absent prior to the butterflies, glow, warmth, oneness with the world or whatever you feel, and it will not be once that particular rush subsides. When every emotion in you wells up to form the words ‘I love you’, it is indicative of a love that has been and will continue to be in you for a significant period of time.

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This is a bit of a bump, I wanted to answer your awesome post earlier but couldn’t find free time until now.

While studying Heidegger I came across this passage that seriously helped me out in trying to understand the nature of love.

“Why is love beyond all measure of other human possibilities so rich and such a sweet burden for the one who has been struck by it? Because we change ourselves into that which we love, and yet remain ourselves. Then we would like to thank the beloved, but find nothing that would do it adequately. We can only be thankful to ourselves. Love transforms gratitude into faithfulness to ourselves and into an unconditional faith in the Other. Thus love steadily expands its most intimate secret. Closeness here is existence in the greatest distance from the other- the distance that allows nothing to dissolve - but rather presents the “thou” in the transparent, but “incomprehensible” revelation of the “just there”. That the presence of the other breaks into our own life - this is what no feeling can fully encompass. Human fate gives itself to human fate, and it is the task of pure love to keep this self-surrender as vital as on the first day.”
— Martin Heidegger

This is actually similar to the Hegelian veiwpoint on love.

Actually Heidegger was quite a Romantic individual. He was a member of the Nazi party and at the same time love interest of Hannah Arendt - a Jewish anti-fascist.

This goes with Heidegger’s way of life.

“We are all dying, one minute at a time - so the best thing we can fo is embrace life” - In this way I guess he means one should embrace love, and do everything possible to keep it around when you do find it.

This is nothing but an interpretation of Heidegger’s thought by myself.

Wanna see what you think.
+

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This is also a bump, to apologise for taking so long to approve your post.

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Oh boy, do I disagree with you. Maybe I’m just a sad sap who experienced so much pain with the word “love” that he ignores it completely, but validating your whole life through a person, not you, is completely wrong in my philosophical book. That’s the individualist speaking in me.

Give me a nice vagina and I’m happy.

11

IMO love is the only sacred thing in human life.

Every other human endeavor, like or dislike, religion, gambling, hookers, playstation, hollywood, the view, university, etc…Is a construct of society.

That raw feeling you get when you see the person you love or used to love, that feeling of pain that arrives when you look at a picture of someone you used to love some time ago. Its not sexual or anything - Its just love.

Have you ever had that feeling for someone, its not a sexual feelings - its just true romance basically.