We all need someone to look at us.
Arendt?, also Kundera – Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 269ff

  • need the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes or the look of the public;
  • need to be looked at by many known eyes;
  • need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love;
  • need to live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present.

Most of us stumble from adolescence into adulthood in possession of selves that are half-formed, unexamined and buffeted by the winds of the world.

If you remain too much of a mystery to yourself, you will rebound and ricochet through life with no sense of how the thing you call you is producing your life.

Perhaps, like Hesse, you believe that self-knowledge is most valuable when it works in secret, wearing the silken sheen of pure thought. Give me my silence, my cave, my texts. But against this there is the opposite view: life is lived in concert with other souls, or else it is a desolation. You get better at loving, or else you are losing.

From an aeon article on Herman Hesse


Anyone who has ever had to explain their own joke knows that comedy cannot survive that sort of analysis. As the American authors E B White and Katharine S White put it in 1941:

Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the purely scientific mind.

While his book on laughter is hardly a rib-tickling read, Bergson didn’t wish to adopt the attitude of an anatomist observing a frog’s dead insides. He believed that laughter should be studied as ‘a living thing’ and treated ‘with the respect due to life’. His investigation was therefore more like that of a field zoologist observing frogs in the wild:

we shall not aim at imprisoning the comic spirit within a definition … We shall confine ourselves to watching it grow and expand.

Like all good metaphorical field zoologists, Bergson started his study by familiarising himself with his metaphorical frog’s natural habitat: in other words, the conditions under which laughter is most likely to appear and thrive. Following this method, Bergson arrived at three general observations.

Replace humor with love….

From an aeon article on Henry Bergson


In Book 11 of St. Augustine’s Confessions, he ruminates on the nature of time, asking, “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.” He goes on to comment on the difficulty of thinking about time, pointing out the inaccuracy of common speech: “For but few things are there of which we speak properly; of most things we speak improperly, still the things intended are understood.”

“What then is love? If no one asks me, I know: if I wish to explain it to one that asketh, I know not.”

 

We all need someone to look at us.
Arendt?, also Kundera – Unbearable Lightness of Being, p. 269ff

  • need the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes or the look of the public;
  • need to be looked at by many known eyes;
  • need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love;
  • need to live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present.

Attunement

Humans are like radios, they are attuned. Humans are attunable.

Human nature is attuned by culture or nurture. Our constitutional nature is attunable in that it has receptors, calculators, etc. The basic force, instinct, drive or impulse (antennae ?) on the bottom of the stack is called self-preservation. It starts on the biological level and works itself in various expressions within the body from the unconscious into sub-conscious and finally into the conscious state of mind.

Self-preservation, via attuned intuition, is keen at identifying the value of things like relationships in perspective of itself. Physical things like food do not have any values in themselves, but only in terms of the relationship to the self-preserved, active or potential.

Love is the word of choice to bestow meaning to a most significant relationship, one of highest value. Even though vulgar language misuses the word all the time.

There is also sexual lust, a non-moral, non-genderized, excitable state of mind somewhere near the bottom of the stack. Lust may have an object of desire (cars, money, etc.), or simply be in anticipation of sexual activity toward climax.

I am attuned to heterosexual relationships. In attunement, lust need not be aroused as such. I am not attuned to gay relationships.

There are flavors of sexual lust. Some flavors of lust are more readily available in heterosexual relations. Other flavors of lust are available only in homosexual relations — man to man or woman to woman. People may be naturally attuned one way or another, and attune themselves to also develop preferences, I guess.

For many a simple man, women are too complex or complicated — too costly in terms of maintaining a comprehensive relationship. However, did men condition women to be so in the first place by relegating them to second grade?

It probably was not always so, and perhaps will not be so in the future. Was it not the emergence of the agricultural age thousands of years ago that brought about possessions and ownership and class status?

Language

https://aeon.co/essays/why-language-remains-the-most-flexible-brain-to-brain-interface

Language in everyday use is less like a channel and more like a tango: a fluid interplay of moves in which people can act as one, yet also retain their individuality. In social interaction there is room, by design, for consent and dissent.

The very possibility of social (as opposed to merely symbiotic, as in having merged in marriage) life — and to survive while being married, depends on there being some separation of private worlds, along with powers to interact on our own terms. In other words, we need something like language in order to be human.

 

Phenomenology – Scheler

To understand the personal value that Scheler speaks of, we must understand that the basic constitution of the person is that of subject, and not object, for “person as person is never an object.” He describes objects as things “finished, complete, static…susceptible to empirical observation of some kind.” Hence, the role that phenomenology plays in adequately accounting for acts of the person that are irreducible and mysterious as persons themselves. The subject, persons, are not “susceptible to empirical observation,” but subject to a phenomenological investigation in which one “must cultivate an openness in which what is actual in the real may reveal itself to him as it is in itself. p.37

Adapted: https://iep.utm.edu/emotion/

Theories of emotion (replace with love) can be categorized in terms of the context within which the explanation is developed. The standard contexts are evolutionary, social and internal.

  • Evolutionary theories attempt to provide an historical analysis of the emotions, usually with a special interest in explaining why humans today have the emotions that they do.
  • Social theories explain emotions as the products of cultures and societies.
  • The internal approach attempts to provide a description of the emotion process itself. 

This article is organized around these three categories and will discuss the basic ideas that are associated with each. Some specific theories, as well as the main features of emotion will also be explained.

Do not confuse ‘being in love’ with ‘love.’

The imprecise use of language is manifest. The “elite” have confused the concept of “being alive” with the concept of “life.” This is not simply the mistaking of an adjective for a noun. Rather, it represents the conflation of a part of a system with its whole. Parts of a living system might themselves be alive (a cell in our finger may be “alive,” as might a fertilized ovum in utero). But those living parts need not be coextensive with a living system and need not represent life. Using language precisely, one rabbit may be alive even though he or she is not life.

Response to “Love is both wonderful and a dangerous evolutionary trick”

https://aeon.co/essays/love-is-both-wonderful-and-a-dangerous-evolutionary-trick

All models are wrong, but some are useful as George Box argued and stressed parsimony and worrying about important wrongs in the selection of models.

The issue with teleology in evolution – ascertained in the author’s response – is that it ascribes goals to a process.

In short, it conflates how with why.

This teleological approach is not parsimonious as it requires a plethora of ad hoc fixes such as an explanation, of why one would love a person known to be infertile if the goal is procreation and passing on of genes.

Through millennia people procreated successfully on the basis of arrangements without the need for love, another problem that has to be resolved ad hoc.

I could l go on ad nauseam and one could find an exception or explanation for every point, making it less and less parsimonious.

Cost and its definition, by the way, is another one of the problems, but that is for another comment and another time.

The alternative view is more parsimonious, not that love is an evolutionary trick to achieve a goal, but a trait, by no means universal, necessary, or sufficient for procreation, prosocial behavior, and so on, that leads to various observable outcomes under different circumstances.

As Heinz von Foerster has noted before, evolution rather than selecting only for the fittest rather eliminates those that are utterly unfit given the specific circumstances, so as long as a trait or combination thereof proves not incompatible with the circumstances of life it may endure through the ages, such as a pinky toe or intelligence.

I agree, however, that the ideal of love that is presented to young girls in the US that they will find their Prince Charming and have a fairy tale wedding, swept away like Cinderella and saved from the ills of this world appears to me at a minimum somewhat anachronistic not only from a feminist point of view.

Author