Love
Published on Sep 13, 2020 (updated Feb 5, 2024), filed under misc (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)
Love is the essence, love is the emotion. You have ideas about love, I have ideas about love. We all have many ideas about love, and will have many more.
Yet itâs striking how we talk about love, as if there was just one (type of) love. In English and German we do know about and sometimes make distinctions, but still, love just seems to be love, as love is often treated as one type of loveâand because of that, probably more often than enough, we talk past each other, misunderstand each other, and fail to feel and show appreciation for each other.
(Would I have an example? The one that most readily comes to my mind is that I love some of my former partnersâeven though I donât love them. That sounds nonsensical but actually makes perfect sense when you consider that there are different forms of love and that we are, and thatâs the point, not at all nuanced but terribly imprecise when it comes to speaking about love.)
Thereâs a part in Aldous Huxleyâs After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, then, in which one of the main characters, Mr. Propter, talks about love. And I quote this, removing the unimportant parts, because it demonstrates the dilemma in a way that only an author like Mr. Huxley can.
[Love.] On the human level the word meansâwhat? Practically everything from Mother to the Marquis de Sade.
[âŠ]We donât even make the simple Greek distinction between erao and philo, eros and agape. With us, everything is just love, whether itâs self-sacrificing or possessive, whether itâs friendship or lust or homicidal lunacy. Itâs all just love. Idiotic word! Even on the human level itâs hopelessly ambiguous. And when you begin using it in relation to experiences on the level of eternityâwell, itâs simply disastrous. âThe love of God.â âGodâs love for us.â âThe saintâs love for his fellows.â What does the word stand for in such phrases? And in what way is this related to what it stands for when itâs applied to a young mother suckling her baby? Or to Romeo climbing into Julietâs bedroom? Or to Othello as he strangles Desdemona? Or to the research worker who loves his science? Or to the patriot whoâs ready to die for his countryâto die, and, in the meantime, to kill, steal, lie, swindle and torture for it? Is there really anything in common between what the word stands for in these contexts and what it stands for when one talks, let us say, of the Buddhaâs love for all sentient beings? Obviously, the answer is: No, there isnât. On the human level, the word stands for a great many different states of mind and ways of behaving.
[âŠ]Distinctions in fact ought to be represented by distinctions in language. If theyâre not, you canât expect to talk sense. In spite of which, we insist on using one word to connote entirely different things. âGod is love,â we say. The wordâs the same as the one we use when we talk about âbeing in love,â or âloving oneâs childrenâ or âbeing inspired by love of country.â Consequently we tend to think that the thing weâre talking about must be more or less the same. We imagine in a vague, reverential way, that God is composed of a kind of immensely magnified yearning. Creating God in our own image. It flatters our vanity, and of course we prefer vanity to understanding. Hence those confusions of language. If we wanted to understand the world, if we wanted to think about it realistically, we should say that we were in love, but that God was x-love. In this way people who had never had any first-hand experience on the level of eternity would at least be given a chance of knowing intellectually that what happens on that level is not the same as what happens on the strictly human level. Theyâd know, because theyâd seen it in print, that there was some kind of difference between love and x-love. Consequently, theyâd have less excuse than people have today for imagining that God was like themselves, only a bit more so on the side of respectability and a bit less so, of course, on the other side.
Distinctions in fact ought to be represented by distinctions in language. I love it.
About Me
Iâm Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and Iâm a web developer, manager, and author. Iâve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies youâve never heard of and companies you use every day, Iâm an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for OâReilly and Frontend Dogma.
I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)