Romantic love, parental love or filial, Platonic love, Agape, all these are but conceptual markers in a sea of emotion. Despite various attempts at typology, our loves feel always unique, primal and irreducible: each one between me as I am and you, each love a unique nexus of narratives about the self and the other, about my world and your world.
The questions below are meant simply as a beginning to our conversation. I hope that your contributions will in turn encourage others to comment and thus establish a dialogue to understand better what makes us human.
I'd like to think that love is always profound, and essentially so. Yet, can we not imagine love that is shallow? Perhaps an art analogy might be helpful. There is good art and bad art as there is profound and frivolous art. Might it not be similarly with love?
I think we can agree that love is an intimate and personal experience: the me is always there, the subject of experience. Yet love is not private like the experience of pain. To love is to be in a dynamic state, it is to create a history and a narrative about the me and the object of love.
If the drive to love exists in the way that Helen Fisher describes it then the satisfaction of it would be the possesion, the assimilation of the love object, somewhat along the lines of hunger which is satisfied by food. Yet we know from experience that love can be its own reward as in the conception of love as a gift or as grace. In fact this conception of love as sacred goes to show that love is a highly desirable experience in its own right.
This brings me to my first question: what of unrequited love? Is there really such a thing or do we mis-name an unfulfilled desire by a lofty phrase?
Another question concerns ritual. If magical ritual is what many anthropologists assert it to be, namely a kind of expressive/ representational act, rather than an instrumental activity, could one perhaps look at everyday conversations in the same light. Might one judge these seemingly empty conversations as a confirming activity of what we both, what we all think the world is like. It is possibly the same with any communal ritual including those of love?
Anyone has read David R. Shumway on the subject, or has heard him speak? Comments?
The questions below are meant simply as a beginning to our conversation. I hope that your contributions will in turn encourage others to comment and thus establish a dialogue to understand better what makes us human.
I'd like to think that love is always profound, and essentially so. Yet, can we not imagine love that is shallow? Perhaps an art analogy might be helpful. There is good art and bad art as there is profound and frivolous art. Might it not be similarly with love?
I think we can agree that love is an intimate and personal experience: the me is always there, the subject of experience. Yet love is not private like the experience of pain. To love is to be in a dynamic state, it is to create a history and a narrative about the me and the object of love.
If the drive to love exists in the way that Helen Fisher describes it then the satisfaction of it would be the possesion, the assimilation of the love object, somewhat along the lines of hunger which is satisfied by food. Yet we know from experience that love can be its own reward as in the conception of love as a gift or as grace. In fact this conception of love as sacred goes to show that love is a highly desirable experience in its own right.
This brings me to my first question: what of unrequited love? Is there really such a thing or do we mis-name an unfulfilled desire by a lofty phrase?
Another question concerns ritual. If magical ritual is what many anthropologists assert it to be, namely a kind of expressive/ representational act, rather than an instrumental activity, could one perhaps look at everyday conversations in the same light. Might one judge these seemingly empty conversations as a confirming activity of what we both, what we all think the world is like. It is possibly the same with any communal ritual including those of love?
Anyone has read David R. Shumway on the subject, or has heard him speak? Comments?
2 comments:
I really enjoyed reading this. I think Helen Fischer (SP?) is onto something. Nothing is going to be a perfect bullseye, however, there is so much to learn about how we work. It's fascinating how love can be described in such scientific terms, and it all makes some sense.
Look up the latest link to Helen Fisher, you will find her very interesting in this dialogue with Roger Bingham.
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