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Philosophy of love
Two intense desires rule and govern mankind and control all man's thoughts, his joys and sorrows. They are man's two appetites, hunger for food and craving for love. Curiously enough, while man takes great pains in the education of the young to prepare them for the gratification of hunger, the much tabooed question of sex has been excluded, in our present civilization, from every discussion.
Yet love lies at the foundation of society, it permeates unconsciously the thoughts, aspirations and hopes of mankind. Love is glorified as the source of the most admirable productions of art, of the sublime creations of poetry and music; it is accepted as the mightiest factor in human civilization, as the basis of the family and state. The egoism of passion and the power of love are absorbing all other considerations. Virgil calls love the greatest conqueror: "Love conquers all; let us yield to it." Solomon sings: "Love is strong as death."
The word love is, as a rule, employed very loosely and made to do duty for almost any attraction, whether purely physical or wholly sentimental. Even great philosophers and distinguished writers rarely differentiate between animal passion and human love or between pure sensuality or the physical part of sex, and mental attraction or the psychic phenomenon.
Plato says that love between a man and a woman is mere animal passion, far inferior in nobility and importance to love for boys, to friendship, or to filial, parental or brotherly love. According to Plato, Socrates understood nothing by love except its science. Eros Uranos (heavenly love) incites only youth, the more intelligent sex, to love and this only at a time when their good character and high culture are beyond doubt.
Plutarch says: The passion for women causes at the best the gain of sensual pleasure and the enjoyment of bodily beauty. The Greeks, therefore, applied the celestial kind of love only to friendship and boy-love, never to the love between men and women.
Guiseppe Sergi finds the cause of love in the stimuli of the reproductive organs, and in the senses of touch and temperature.
Ernst Haeckel says: The oldest source of sexual love is found in the chemical attraction which the male and female sexual cells exercise upon each other. This sexual affinity is found even in the lowest stage of plants as in the protophytes, where both cells swim toward each other to unite.
Johann Karl Friedrich Rosenkranz finds in nature only an empire of love, of a love that penetrates all things and leads them to a common end. Gravitation is love dominating nature. Organic life is a continued phenomenon of love. Even in inorganic nature the combination of substances, one with the other, is a trait of love. The appearance of heat and the flash of light that accompany the chemical process are, in a manner, the heralds of lust felt by the substances while uniting. Love of the sexes is a love for things that is ignored and unknown and which is not yet even in existence. The lovers must perish that love may continually rise to new life; the individual dies that the species may live. Love is not the aim but the means, serving life and development.
Love is the joy at another's existence and is stronger than the delight at one's own existence. Love transforms the nuptials into a jubilee even where it is the eve of death. It is hence as strong as death. There exists not only a natural love, but also a spiritual love that is stronger than death. Natural love is not the true love, but only a stepping-stone. True love is no longer blind and necessary, but conscious and free.
Arthur Schopenhauer sees in amorousness an individualized sexual impulse. The growing affection of the two lovers is, in reality, the will for life of the new individual that they could and might beget. The species has a prior, nearer and greater claim upon the individual than the frail individuality itself. The exact destiny of the individuals of the future generation is a much higher and worthier end than the extravagant and transient bubbles of the enamored. The beauty or the ugliness of the mate has nothing to do with the gratification itself, so far as it is a sensual pleasure depending upon a pressing necessity of the individual. Yet beauty is a matter of great consideration, because it represents the will of the species. Every lover finds himself deceived after the accomplished great work. For the delusion has vanished by which the individual was deceived by the species.
In defining human love, Schopenhauer says that every individual exercises a sexual attraction proportionate to the moral and physical perfection it possesses which we attribute to the ideal of the human species. The attraction of two individuals will be the more energetic the more the deficiencies of the one will be counterbalanced by the virtues of the other, and the union of the two promises a child more conforming to the type of the species. Thus the greater the disparity the stronger will be the attraction.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau says: The physical desire is the one which drives one sex to unite with the other. The moral one is that which determines the desire and fixes it upon a single object exclusively, or at least gives a greater degree of energy for this preferred object. Now it is easily seen that the moral element in love is a factitious sentiment born of the usage of society and glorified with assiduity and care by women to establish their dominion.
Franz Joseph Delboeuf looks for the basis of love in the chemical action by which the female sex cells, or ova, exercise an attraction, magnetic in nature, upon the spermatozoa, and vice versa.
Baruch Spinoza defines love as “a pleasure accompanied by the thought of its external cause.”
Alexander Bain finds the cause of love in the charm of dissimilarity.
Paolo Mantegazza defines love as a desire for a particular beauty.
Eduard von Hartmann says: Man is moved by instinct to look for an individual of the other sex to satisfy his physical necessity, imagining that in this way he will enjoy a pleasure he would look for in vain elsewhere. This pleasure, one lover dreams to find in the arms of the other, is only a delusion. Subconsciousness uses these deceiving means to oppose the egotistic reflection and to dispose the individual to sacrifice its own interest to the interest of the future generation.
Herbert Spencer says that the passions that unite the sexes are the most complex and the most powerful of all feelings. Admiration, respect, reverence, love of approbation, emotion of self-esteem, pleasure of possession, love of freedom, love of sympathy, they all unite in the one powerful feeling of love. They represent a variety of pleasurable ideas, not in themselves amatory, but have an organized relation to the amatory feelings. The complex sentiment, termed affection, can, therefore, exist between those of the same sex, but it is greatly exalted in love.
The poet, Philip Sidney declares love to be the most intense desire to enjoy beauty, and where it is reciprocal, the most entire and exact union of hearts. The instinct, on the other hand, is absolutely sensual; it makes the exterior its object and has no other end than sensual pleasure. Every individual, therefore, loves more or less spiritually or sensually in proportion as it approaches to the spiritual or bestial nature.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel says: Love is the complete surrender of the "ego" to another "ego" or to an ideal. Not the sacrifice of the possession or wealth of the ego, but the "I" itself must be given away.
Finally, Pierre Janet declares love to be complete madness in its origin as well as in its development and mechanism.
These philosophic definitions of love all have an interest for the reader, since they help to indicate the difficulty of classifying or of describing the emotion. However for a practical study of love it may be sufficient to show two distinct types of love; i.e. "sensual" love and "sentimental" love. Sensual love is the instinctive form of the emotion such as is found in all nature. Sentimental love, although grounded in the self-same instincts of self-preservation and racial perpetuation, has added to it the mental qualities found only in civilized human beings.
Gustav Teichmuller says: In sensual love, Nature makes use of the individual only incidentally by making the propagation of the species a personal concern of the individual. She gains her end by a mystification. The individuals, by virtue of the innate impulse, consider the external aim of nature as their own personal concern, for which they voluntarily hazard everything, even life itself. Teichmuller further claims that in physical love only the state of irritability and the sensibility of the nerves of the subject are important. The object is only concerned as a soliciting casualty. The natural impulse cannot aim at lust, for lust is not an end, but only expresses the coordinate state of the subject during the actions. Every desire aims at a specific action as its end. The musician does not long for lust but for music. The pleasure connected with it ensues coordinately with the success of the performance.
Of sentimental love, Teichimiller says, the individual loves an ideal that it has itself created in its thoughts and fancy and with which the actual need not harmonize at all. For that reason the "treasure" lies not without but within the lover. The beloved person outside is only the key that understands how to unlock the treasure. The key is not able to create the wealth. Whoever is poor and desolate within, for him no key can unlock the treasure of love.
When a man, for instance, is attached to a woman because of her outward harmonious appearance, i.e., beauty, it means that she pleases his sense of sight. If he is fascinated by her beautiful voice, then his sense of hearing has been appealed to. When he falls in love by the touch of her soft little hand, then his tactile sense has been excited. The meaning of all such attachments is the desire to satisfy the senses. Hence the love is sensual. For any of the five senses may be the starting point of sexual desire.
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