What is your definition of Love?

Cassie Franse (6)

2^nd post

April 29, 2016

Philosophy

Previous post: http://cophilosophy.blogspot.com/2016/04/what-is-love-baby-dont-hurt-me-no-more.html

What is Love?

              The word ‘love’ meant different ideas and had various meanings to each philosopher. For Georg Wilhelm Hegel, it was all experience, and how that experience becomes a data point that is a part of a bigger picture. For Soren Kierkegaard, he had a love he wrote about in his journals, but he believed his ‘melancholy’ to be a great factor and broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen; which only fueled his unhappiness. For Arthur Schopenhauer, he never really had any luck with the ladies of his choosing and this might have had an effect on his negative outlook on the idea of love and the reason he lived only with poodles.

                I can see Hegel’s idea where the experiences we gather are a part of a greater framework coming together and we won’t understand the significance of who, when, where, and why until after that event has passed. History does hold a lot of answers for us and it takes patience to wait and discern the meaning for ourselves. Hegel himself wasn’t too involved in the topic of love because his main focus was the combining of history with philosophy. I only incorporated him because Schopenhauer disliked him and Hegel is one of my favorite philosophers.

                Soren Kierkegaard’s writings of Regine in his journal make me visualize him humming, while twirling his hair around his finger writing idealistically of his love for her. After the engagement was broken off, Soren dedicated himself to his works and published Works of Love. This work featured the idea of building up love, but ‘to build up’ is a metaphorical expression; the idea of love that you might have is what others have shown you, and this knowledge builds up to your understanding of what love is. Kierkegaard in Works of Love says, “But love is not a being-for-itself quality but a quality by which or in which you are for others. Loving means to presuppose love in others.”  

                Love was not kind to Arthur Schopenhauer, and this might have contributed to his pessimistic view of love and marriage. He fell in love twice, neither worked out, and one woman very clearly rejected him in her diary. He was quoted as saying “Marrying means to halve one’s rights and double one’s duties,” and “Marrying means to grasp blindfolded into a sack hoping to find an eel amongst an assembly of snakes.” After no luck with love, it is no wonder he viewed women in such an evil sense, he resented the rejection and caused him to form his own justification to his pessimism of relationships and ultimately everything else in life.

                There are so many definitions to what love might actually be or mean, and I can only give my analysis. I think love is when two people share a strong bond. Love is not always romantic, but it can just be a mutual bond that makes a person not feel so alone in such a big world. Finding someone who understands you and knows what you mean without much explanation is what love is, you share part of yourself with that one person. It’s hard to define, but I think you can love as much as you want; it just depends on the size of your heart and those definitive bonds you share with the different people in your life. Love is knowing someone has your back, always.