Annely Rivero
#9
installment 1
Love.......
What is love? Baby don't hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more. Through the history of mankind, we have encountered many unsolved mysteries. However; the most important mystery of all may be what binds us all together and created the human race, love. There have been a variety of theories presented, explaining its existence, and presence. Plato suggested that we love in order to find our other half, soul, to become complete. Schopenhauer proposed that love is a scheme of human nature used to reproduce. Russell explained we love in avoidance of loneness. Buddha expressed that we aim to fulfill our superficial desires, and labeled this as a defect. Beauvoir symbolized love as a desire to integrate with another individual; yet, she saw flaws as to how we approach love. Moreover; love has been linked to happiness and release of positive endorphins.
In Plato's symposium he explained love in story about Aristophanes telling a story at a dinner party. Aristophanes states that humans were once attached to one another, belonging to each other, and one day Zeus was angered and decided to divide them though the middle. Since then each person has felt the longing need to find his or her other half in order to feel whole once again. Along with this Plato viewed love as desire. It begins by viewing ourselves as imperfect and feeding the need to find one that is more perfect than I. Many times, we attempt to reach happiness by emphasizing our need to find someone that has the qualities that we lack. We aim at something that is nearly impossible to obtain, yet we still fall in love. While we initiate the stages of falling in love, we can't help but to think of the dangers. This individual that we are falling for has the power to make you happy or hurt you.
Love hold a great impact in our life, increasing hope, happiness, and hatred all at once. It's an emotion that is, at many times, unavoidable. Once attraction begins we feel the need to fill a void in order to make us happier. Some philosophers may disagree to this idea. Schopenhauer presented the idea that love was a foolish trick of nature in order to get us to procreate. He called love a "voluptuous illusion". According to Schopenhauer we love because our desires lead us to believe we need another individual to be happy, but he believes this is the way nature fools us in to consummating a relationship by children. Once our desires have been met we are once again in a voided state of existence.
Bertrand Russell expressed that we have love to meet our physical and psychological needs. We needed to love in order to forget about the troubles of the world. He acknowledges that we have the necessity to reproduce, but cannot do so, without sex. Passion aids in the longing to have sex which in turn provides reproduction. The warmth and intimate feelings love provides give us a sense of belonging and overcome a fear of our earthly troubles.
In my second installment I will be going more in depth as to how we can improve love, and why it requires specific areas of improvement, as well as talking about Buddha, Beauvoir, and the links between love and psychology.
Resources:
http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1577531/jewish/What-Is-Love.htm
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-truisms-wellness/201702/all-about-love
Love as an interpersonal phenomenon is an instance, possibly the most compelling and irresistible, of a much wider category we might better call passion - except that "passion" sounds passive, when in fact love is above all a verb. Whatever you call it, when you have it and are motivated by it, the world is alight and full of meaning. I've already quoted the Beatles here, but again: "in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make."
ReplyDeletelove is like a roller coaster: ups, downs, terrifying, thrilling, and scary as crap! I Knew all long it was a trick! Haha. Very interesting post!
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