For the Greeks you had eros, agape, philia, and perhaps storge. — Leontiskos

I wanted to ask: why is this question given such low priority? The arts are filled with references to love. — Count Timothy von Icarus

It seems to me that we might love someone, but not love everything about them. So, to some extent, Plato and Augustine seem to get something right. At the same time, we love people for who they are, in spite of their flaws, and so it seems like the personalist account also gets something right as well. To me, love seems to be about wanting the best for a person, but also a sharing in that goodness through a transcendent union. — Count Timothy von Icarus

For me the attribute which is often left out is how love makes you feel. Ineffable, subjective, a bit of a qualia problem and therefore for some people, intangible or BS. — Tom Storm

I suspect most philosophers wouldn't touch the subject, because it's so closely associated with *pth! pth!* icky girls. Beyond sexual attraction, one of the strongest human bonds is between mated pairs, and one of the fiercest kinds of love is maternal. I think they just didn't want to sully their grand theories with the feelings of and toward women. — Vera Mont

Love is the recognition of yourself in the other. — frank

Love is present when you can never need to say you’re sorry. — Bella fekete

It seems to me that we might love someone, but not love everything about them. So, to some extent, Plato and Augustine seem to get something right. At the same time, we love people for who they are, in spite of their flaws, and so it seems like the personalist account also gets something right as well. To me, love seems to be about wanting the best for a person, but also a sharing in that goodness through a transcendent union. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think the Greeks' different words for what we have subsumed into 'love' made some kind of sense, though. There is storge towards Ma and Pa; philia for the like-minded; eros for individual fierce attachments (though Plato had Diotima make this the fulcrum of everything) and agape for spiritual love. It would be an interesting enquiry as to how we have come to merge these different strands of feeling into the one word, which seems to me to burst at its seams to contain them all. — mcdoodle

I thought that opposites attract — Agree-to-Disagree

Perhaps this has to do with almost all major philosophers being life-long bachelors?

I wanted to ask: why is this question given such low priority? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ha, but how much of philosophy is just that! — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wanted to ask: why is this question given such low priority? The arts are filled with references to love. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Know what's so ripe here? You just admitted to never reading Nietzsche, yet your profile picture is of Guts from Berserk and yet Berserk is a story that heavily borrows from Nietzsche's philosophy and psychology.

413. Lovers As Short-sighted People.—A pair of powerful spectacles has sometimes sufficed to cure a person in love; and whoever has had sufficient imagination to represent a face or form twenty years older, has probably gone through life not much disturbed.

401. To Love and to Possess.—As a rule women love a distinguished man to the extent that they wish to possess him exclusively. They would gladly keep him under lock and key, if their vanity did not forbid, but vanity demands that he should also appear distinguished before others.

The Gay Science 363

... I will never admit that we should speak of equal rights in the love of man and woman: there are no such equal rights. The reason is that man and woman understand something different by the term love,—and it belongs to the conditions of love in both sexes that the one sex does not presuppose the same feeling, the same conception of "love," in the other sex. What woman understands by love is clear enough: complete surrender (not merely devotion) of soul and body, without any motive, without any reservation, rather with shame and terror at the thought of a devotion restricted by clauses or associated with conditions. In this absence of conditions her love is precisely a faith: woman has no other.—Man, when he loves a woman, wants precisely this love from her; he is consequently, as regards himself, furthest removed from the prerequisites of feminine love; granted, however, that there should also be men to whom on their side the demand for complete devotion is not unfamiliar,—well, they are really—not men. A man who loves like a woman becomes thereby a slave; a woman, however, who loves like a woman becomes thereby a more perfect woman. ... The passion of woman in its unconditional renunciation of its own rights presupposes in fact that there does not exist on the other side an equal pathos, an equal desire for renunciation: for if both renounced themselves out of love, there would result—well, I don't know what, perhaps a horror vacui? Woman wants to be taken and accepted as a possession, she wishes to be merged in the conceptions of "possession" and "possessed"; consequently she wants one who takes, who does not offer and give himself away, but who reversely is rather to be made richer in "himself"—by the increase of power, happiness and faith which the woman herself gives to him.

"Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy. Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child."

The Gay Science 14


What is called Love.—The lust of property, and love: what different associations each of these ideas evoke!—and yet it might be the same impulse twice named: on the one occasion disparaged from the standpoint of those already possessing (in whom the impulse has attained something of repose,—who are now apprehensive for the safety of their "possession"); on the other occasion viewed from the standpoint of the unsatisfied and thirsty, and therefore glorified as "good." Our love of our neighbour,—is it not a striving after new property? And similarly our love of knowledge, of truth; and in general all the striving after novelties? We gradually become satiated with the old and securely possessed, and again stretch out our hands; even the finest landscape in which we live for three months is no longer certain of our love, and any kind of more distant coast excites our covetousness: the possession for the most part becomes smaller through possessing. Our pleasure in ourselves seeks to maintain itself by always transforming something new into ourselves,—that is just possessing. To become satiated with a possession, that is to become satiated with ourselves. (One can also suffer from excess,—even the desire to cast away, to share out, may assume the honourable name of "love.") When we see any one suffering, we willingly utilise the opportunity then afforded to take possession of him; the beneficent and sympathetic man, for example, does this; he also calls the desire for new possession awakened in him, by the name of "love," and has enjoyment in it, as in a new acquisition suggesting itself to him. The love of the sexes, however, betrays itself most plainly as the striving after possession: the lover wants the unconditioned, sole possession of the person longed for by him; he wants just as absolute power over her soul as over her body; he wants to be loved solely, and to dwell and rule in the other soul as what is highest and most to be desired.

There is, of course, here and there on this terrestrial sphere a kind of sequel to love, in which that covetous longing of two persons for one another has yielded to a new desire and covetousness, to a common, higher thirst for a superior ideal standing above them: but who knows this love? Who has experienced it? Its right name is friendship.

To me, love seems to be about wanting the best for a person, but also a sharing in that goodness through a transcendent union. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Love is just a word and how similarly it's being used in different contexts isn't necessarily indicative of anything. What does it say if certain aspects of love between parent and child weren't present in how one loves food? Surely, the answer is close to nothing. Is the love felt towards one's parents only truly what you can also say about how one loves music and food? — Judaka

.baby don't hurt me, no more.

(I'll put that up front so no one else feels tempted.) — Count Timothy von Icarus