Love, an enigmatic and profound emotion, has been a subject of philosophical, literary, and scientific inquiry for centuries. It is a multifaceted phenomenon that transcends mere romantic involvement, encompassing a broad spectrum of human experiences, including familial bonds, friendships, and even love for humanity as a whole. Love is not just an emotion or a feeling; it is a fundamental mode of human existence that shapes our lives, relationships, and our very sense of being. This essay explores love as a mode of human existence, examining its various dimensions and its integral role in the human experience. Deep dive into human existence and human emotions.
Love has manifold dimensions and eludes a definition. Love means relatedness, to anchor with someone and to seek one’s roots in others. Unlike sex, such as love does not necessarily need an object. It may include erotic love, mother-child love, and love for your friend. We love our own creation; it may be an artwork, a painting, and a poem.
Love is the most misunderstood and mystified human impulse and a social relation. Everything we do is powered by love or is a result of its abuse. The abuse of love leads to wars, crimes, terrorism, drug and psychosis. Love stands abused in our society that is deeply ridden with the human relation crisis and narcissism. The woman who gives birth to men stands condemned in the eyes of the man. Unless the woman is treated with respect and dignity, and love is not abused in our social relations, men will remain disgraced forever and there can be no peace and harmony in our lives.
Love, in its many forms, is a fundamental mode of human existence. It shapes our relationships, influences our actions, and defines our sense of self. Whether through the passionate intensity of romantic love, the steadfast loyalty of familial bonds, the deep connection of friendships, or the compassionate embrace of universal love, love permeates every aspect of human life. It is a transformative force that fosters personal growth, healing, and social cohesion. Philosophical perspectives on love further illuminate its profound significance, offering insights into its nature and purpose. Existentialist philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, explored the role of love in the context of human freedom and authenticity. They argued that love involves a delicate balance between autonomy and connection, where individuals must navigate the tension between their own freedom and the desire to be loved. For existentialists, authentic love requires mutual recognition and respect for each other’s freedom and individuality. Ultimately, love is not just an emotion but a way of being that enriches our lives and connects us to the greater human experience.
Love is A Transformative Force
Love’s fundamental role in human existence is a testament to its capacity to create meaningful connections and contribute to the well-being of individuals and society as a whole. Love is a powerful and transformative human emotion that can inspire selflessness, sacrifice, and profound connection, but also lead to jealousy and despair, national wars and racial conflicts. Romantic love is celebrated for its passion, intimacy, and commitment, serving as the foundation for partnerships and families. Familial love, on the other hand, encompasses the unconditional bonds between family members, providing a sense of belonging, security, and identity. Love’s diversity lies in its various expressions and its deep impact on individuals and society, contributing to personal development and emotional well-being.
It has power of personal growth, Healing and Reconciliation. It is kernel of social cohesion. Love’s transformative power is evident in its ability to drive personal growth, healing, and social cohesion. In romantic relationships, love inspires individuals to evolve and nurture positive traits. Love also aids in healing emotional wounds and facilitating reconciliation, providing solace and support in times of conflict or trauma. On a societal level, love promotes social cohesion and stability by ensuring the care and upbringing of children, fostering community bonds, and encouraging acts of kindness and philanthropy.
Love Is Universal And Inclusive
Hawkins argues, “Love takes no position and thus is global, arising above the separation of positionality. It is then possible to be one with another” as there, are no longer barriers. Love is, therefore, inclusive and expands the sense of self progressively. Love focuses on the goodness of life in all its expressions and augments that which is positive. It dissolves negativity by re-contextualizing it rather than by attacking it.” (Hawkins, 1995)
Love is universal and it is a selfless. It can be the unconditional love for humanity as a whole. It transcends individual relationships and embraces a broader, more inclusive compassion for all people. This form of love is often associated with altruism, empathy, and a commitment to social justice. It encourages individuals to act for the greater good, fostering a sense of unity and collective responsibility. Love happens just you have to clean your heart from narcissism, envy, hatred, and prejudice, free yourself from the bonds of blood and soil and seek yourself in others irrespective of caste, color, and creed. It is there inside all of us. You do not have to do anything. It will happen on its own
It is against narcissism in all of its manifestations, including hate, envy, competition, hegemony, and domination. It is against the separation of economics from ethics and politics, and ethics from collective life.
Love Is A Bond Of Social Relationship
The urge to connect and communicate with others is built-in our mental as well as neural architecture. Computers in a network ping one another even if these do not have much to communicate, likewise, humans waste a lot of time in gossip and chatting. Our senses need to be used, we need to communicate; we need to talk to the people and establish a meaningful relationship with them and without such an activity, we cannot remain mentally healthy. Lack of communication can affect our ability to form and maintain emotionally significant relationships with others. Our selfhood and mental health depend on how we relate to others and how we communicate with them.
‘’To be’ is ‘to be in love’, understanding oneself by understanding others and seeking one’s roots in them. It can be defined in several ways. Love is an urge and affinity to get attracted towards a fellow human being and to take care of his/her well-being. It has the same function as that of grooming in sub-human primates which enhances their social bonds, group cohesion, and solidarity. This makes love a social relation. Love means solidarity, compassion, empathy, care, and concern. In this sense, it is an active concern for the life and all creative powers that makes something to grow and develop at its own cost and enhance the quality of life and contributes to the survival of humanity.
Win-Win Relation
We all suffer from a sense of incompleteness and feeling of being part of something beyond us. We have a strong urge to become complete, to seek our roots in others and relate to them meaningfully. Even the need for belonging may overcome our physiological and security needs at times. Humans need to feel a sense of belongingness and acceptance in their social groups and need to love and be loved – both sexually and non-sexually – by others.
It is a creative living force and a win-win game in which both lover and the beloved are the winners, like mother and her child, lover and beloved. Lover gains by becoming a giver or a donor. However, by losing he wins. A lover gains by giving, by violating the norms of reciprocity and exchange. This way love negates norms of social exchange and reciprocity. It is spontaneous and eludes all predictions, and it does not comply with social norms and prejudice. As it is also a subjective feeling, a determined chaos, it is not completely rational. When it engulfs a person, it takes him away in a whirlpool and connects him with his beloved. You have no idea what will happen next in your love life. It transforms one’s self, such that a lover becomes selfless yet his selfhood gets enhanced, and his self-interest is in becoming selfless. He attains more freedom and autonomy by accepting the freedom of his beloved. It is just through love that man can overcome his separateness from his fellow human beings meaningfully and authentically. As Erich Fromm affirms, love in this sense is never restricted to one person. If I can love only one person, and nobody else, if my love for one person makes me more alienated and distant from my fellow man, I may be attached to this person in any number of ways, yet I do not love. If I can say, “I love you,” I say, “I love in you all of humanity, all that is alive; I love in you also myself.” Self-love, in this sense, is the opposite of selfishness. The later is actually a greedy concern with oneself which springs from and compensates for the lack of genuine love for oneself. Love, paradoxically, makes me more independent because it makes me stronger and happier- yet it makes me one with the loved Person to the extent that individuality seems to be extinguished for the moment. In loving I experience “I am you,” you-the loved the person, you-the stranger, you-everything ~live. In the experience of love lies the only answer to be human, lays sanity. (Fromm, 1995)
Love As A Hidden Un-Manifest Creative Power
Taking a computer analogy again, the processes active on your computer are an example of an un-manifest processes. Very few computer users know that our personal computers run a host of services in the background utilizing a lot of computer resources that make the possible smooth functioning of the various functions of the computer. For example, there is a service which makes printing a document possible. If the Windows operating system stops this service for any reason we cannot do any printing even if printing software and printer functions normally. Likewise, we are not aware of autonomic physiological processes controlling our visceral functions and other regulatory processes, unless these physiological processes malfunction. Same is true of the human society. Society is run not by the government but by the host of non-stop services and functions that operate in the background. We are unaware of these services and their importance for our life, as these remain invisible from us but always available to us. Even those who are engaged in such services are not fully aware of the importance of their own work. Reich writes about three such hidden human powers, principles and resources without which no society will be possible: those are love, work, and knowledge. (REICH, 1945) Robert Wright tells us about evolutionary roots of love, “altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, and the sense of justice—all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis” (1994: 12). (Tremlin, 2006)
Love is an un-manifest creative process that permeates the entire animal kingdom. Whole nature abounds with the examples of love, care, and compassion, whether beasts and killers, predators and prey, strong and the week, evil or good persons, all bear suffering and pain to create and nurture their progeny before they die.
Relation between Love and Narcissism
Hate is not opposite of love as it is widely believed to be. Hate means when you strive to destroy something you love but you cannot possess or consume. It is a child of narcissism. It sees other persons worthy of some use to be possessed and as a means to one’s ends, and when one cannot possess or use the object of love, one hates it. Thus, hate is related to narcissism but is not a true negation of love.
Narcissism is opposite of love; a narcissist is a person who is incapable of loving. A narcissist indulges in a zero-sum game in which one’s gain is other’s loss, not a win-win game like love. A narcissist is a self-centered person that sees everyone else as a means to satisfy his needs, not end in itself. He is incapable of loving or becoming a giver and always feels unsatisfied when he faces un-possessibility of the other or the lack of something he desires most but does not know how to possess it completely, thus he gets frustrated, and it manifests in hate. Epstein writes about narcissism as a desire of being in the object mode, “desire, while it can be inflamed under the object mode, are unlikely to be satisfied with it. It is much more likely to be diverted into clinging in the frantic effort to secure some kind of unforthcoming security. The opening up of subjective appreciation, on the other hand, involves recognition of the un-possessability of the other. This recognition, which literally “gives space,” allows desire to operate as it would in a well-crafted Japanese garden. Since the other is never capable of being totally revealed, he or she is also capable of being continually inspiring. Desire feeds off otherness, and otherness inspires desire. (EPSTEIN, 2006) He explains desire in the object mode: in this version of desire, the self actively tries to get its needs met by manipulating its environment, extracting what it requires from a world that is consistently objectified. However, it is this version of desire that tends toward frustration and disappointment that can never be entirely satisfied. (EPSTEIN, 2006)
A narcissist takes everything as an object of desire to be used or possessed and strives to live at the cost of others. He is someone who is living in the basement of Maslow’s pyramid of needs like an animal and has not evolved into a full human being. He turns everything into a thing to be used and treats every person as a usable object. While narcissism is a sickness of mind and spiritual immaturity, love is sanity and a fruit of spiritual growth. Love as a social bond is anti-thesis of narcissism and is impossible unless one transcends one’s individual existence and animal needs, and give recognition to needs and desires of another subject whom one loves.
Love And Oneness Of Humanity
Religions and men’s ideologies talk of unity of mankind, people of all races and ethnicities. However, the unity of humanity is meaningless without the unity of the two sexes, man and woman, and anend to individual’s alienation. Individuation of a person, his separation from others or his aloneness, is a problem of human existence. Being, as Freeman illustrates, is being-with. A person’s life story is always a narrative of the relationship to what is other-than-self. (Wagoner, 1997) More individuation of a person is within a society due to urbanization and modernization, more problems he will face to form a relation with other isolated selves. For him, the easiest way to overcome his isolation is to belong to the herd, family, community, caste, nation, etc. We love our family, caste, community, the nation to hide our weakness, isolation, and insignificance. That is not love as Fromm argues, “The person who has not freed himself from the ties to blood and soil is not yet fully born as a human being; his capacity for love and reason are crippled; he does not experience himself nor his fellow man in their -and his own-human reality. (Fromm, 1995)
The relations of blood and soil are nothing but surrender before the conditions of our life. Here we have no choice and no freedom to act otherwise. We love our brothers, sisters, and parents out of compulsion. We achieve oneness through the sameness and uncritical conformity; we become clones and do not remain ourselves. The only thing we achieve is ending our loneliness and isolation. In contrast to this, love helps us to end our separation from the other and leads to oneness without losing one’s individuality. In contrast to this, conformity leads to sameness at the cost of one’s individuality. Love enhances individuality, and sameness degrades an individual. Love makes us human and sameness makes us sheep, a herd animal. Blok argues that sameness does not lead to unity and it leads to the narcissism of minor differences and results in violence and hate crimes. (Blok 1998) Fromm puts it this way: the family and the clan, and later the state, nation or church, assumes the same function which the individual mother had originally for the child. The individual leans on them, feels rooted in them, has his sense of identity as a part of them, and not as an individual apart from them. The person who does not belong to the same clan is considered as alien and dangerous as not sharing in the same human qualities which only the own clan possesses. (Fromm, 1995)
Women Gateway of Love
Women are the gateway of love; she is the final common path of compassion and empathy. She is a grower of love. Men as babies depend on her for all physical and psychological needs and are at her mercy during infancy. If the mother fails to take care of her baby due to any reason, even if he survives with the support of other elders, the child will never grow as a normal child psychologically and socially. A woman is a genuine and authentic giver and has given life to so-called prophets and great men of history.
We are the result of the seeds of the love of our mothers, without her care and support our existence would not have been possible. Our sanity and normalization were due to her love. It is a relationship of mutual love and trust between the baby and the mother that is most important for child’s healthy mental development. Ask a psychiatrist what happens if a mother stops loving her baby, even if she takes good care of his physiological needs. He will never grow as a healthy human being. Any problem between child-mother relationships is one reason of mental illness.
Love is the medicine that can set right the pathology of human relations. It is only through love that we can dismantle power structures and dissolve envy, narcissism, and hatred we see all around us. Just see the world through woman’s eyes, everything will change, and you will get transformed, and the world will look different to you as if you have not seen it before. It was the same ecstatic experience, you have to set aside Cartesian rationality.
Love is the only solution to the existential problems of modern man. It is not only an emotion, but it is also a human relation. It is the magic wand that can turn a bed of thorns into a bed of roses and an enemy into a friend. Love means the mutual recognition of each other’s autonomy and identity and unconditional human solidarity.
We need to liberate ourselves from blind conformism. Then alone you can enter the domain of love, transcendence, and relatedness. Reason does not know anything about it. The rationality is a means, not an end in itself, and the end is derived from human subjectivity. Human subjectivity and mind have their own logarithm of relationships, which cannot be completely understood through Cartesian rationality. Human cognition is highly complex not an all-or-none reflexive reaction as that of animals. It is a mediated response that involves lingual and non-lingual signs as represented in individual consciousness and the collective mind.
REFERENCES:
Blok, A. (1998). The Narcissism of Minor Differences. European Journal of Social Theory; 1; 33, 1; 33.
Epstein, M. (2006). Open to Desire. Gotham Books.
Fromm, E. (1989). Beyond The Chains Of Illusion. Abacus.
—. (1961). Marx’s Concept Of Man. New York : Frederick
—. (1995). Sane Society. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.
—. (1956). The art of loving . Choun Publishing Co. Ungar Publishing Co. New York , 1961.
Hawkins, D. R. (1995). Power Versus Force. Hay House Australia Pty Ltd.
Reich, Wilhelm. The Mass Psychology Of Fascism, (E. T. Wolfe, Trans.). Orgone Institute Press., 1945.
Tremlin, T. (2006). Minds and Gods. Oxford University Press.
Vladimir Solovyov, The Meaning of Love Owen Barfield,
Thomas R. Beyer Jane Marshall Steiner Books, Incorporated, San Mateo, 1985
The Metaphysics of Love Frederick D. Wilhelmsen Routledge, 5 Jul 2017
The Nature of Love, Volume 3: The Modern World Irving Singer MIT Press, 27 Feb 2009
Wagoner, R. E. (1997). The Meanings of Love. Praeger Publishers.
Online Reference That Might Interest You
- Love is more than just a kiss
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S030645221101284X (accessed on 15/07/2024)
- Love and the Brain https://hms.harvard.edu/news-events/publications-archive/brain/love-brain
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- What happens in your brain when you’re in love?
https://www.apa.org/topics/marriage-relationships/brain-on-love (accessed on 15/07/2024)
- The biochemistry of love: an oxytocin hypothesis
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3537144/ (accessed on 15/07/2024)
- How animals collaborate: Underlying proximate mechanisms
https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcs.1529 (accessed on 15/07/2024)
- Cooperation Among Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective https://academic.oup.com/book/54123 (accessed on 15/07/2024)
- Cooperation, Conflict, and the Evolution of Complex Animal Societies
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/cooperation-conflict-and-the-evolution-of-complex-13236526/ (accessed on 15/07/2024)