Love Between Embodiment and Spirituality: Jean‐Luc Marion and John Paul II on Erotic Love

While theological discourse on love traditionally bifurcates between love as a body‐bound passion and its superior and disembodied spiritual counterpart, a growing number of accounts have recently challenged the traditional division arguing for the fundamental unity of the phenomenon of love. Could such a dichotomy be overcome if one reversed the conventional hierarchy between bodily erotic and intellectual agapeic love and made erotic love between man and woman the fundamental paradigm of all kinds of loves? Could the reversal recuperate the affective aspect that has traditionally been downplayed? An answer to these questions is explored through an imaginary dialogue between Jean‐Luc Marion's phenomenology of one‐way erotic love and John Paul II's theology of embodied love.     

Love in cross-cultural perspective: Mozambique-France comparison

The study aimed to characterise the conceptualisation of love in Mozambique (a collectivist society) and France (an individualistic society) on three attributes: passion, intimacy, and commitment. The study sample comprised 310 Mozambican adults (females = 57%; age range = 18-64) and 220 French adults (females = 54%; age range = 18-64). They completed 27 information scenarios on passion, intimacy, and commitment. The data were analysed utilising mixed-method estimation of the variance accounted for by the three components of love. Results indicated that for the Mozambican participants passion was the most important factor (46%) in love expression, followed by commitment (37%), and intimacy (17%). For the French participants, passion was the most important factor (50%), followed by intimacy (28%), and commitment (22%). Across countries, the weight given to passion was reported to decline over age while the weight assigned to commitment was reported to increase with age.     

Globalising Love: On the Nature and Scope of Love as a Form of Recognition

This article begins by tracing two issues to be kept in mind in discussing the theme of love as far back as Aristotle: on the one hand the polysemy of the term philia in Aristotle, and on the other hand the fact that there is a focal or core meaning of philia that provides order to that polysemy. Secondly, it is briefly suggested that the same issues are, mutatis mutandis, central for understanding the discussion of love or Liebe by Hegel, the central classic reference in debates on recognition. Thirdly, by pointing out a certain ambiguity in Harry Frankfurt’s recent work on love, the article focuses more closely on the thought that love in the simple sense which Aristotle had pinpointed as the focal meaning of philia, which is arguably at the core of Hegel’s discussion of Liebe, and which still forms at least one of the core senses of the term, is a ‘personifying’ attitude of recognition. Finally, drawing on the above points the article addresses the question whether love as a form of recognition is restricted to intimate relations such as those between family-members, ‘lovers’, close friends and so on, or whether it has applications in interhuman relations more broadly. The answer to this question, it is suggested, is essential for the viability of ethically substantial notions of solidarity beyond circles of close acquaintances, whether within the civil society, across nations, or towards future generations.     

The Two Sides of Love

Abstract The kind of love under consideration here is that between equal persons as it typically occurs within the context of a friendship. It is assumed that love opens the way to a sense of meaning or purpose for the individual, the difficulty addressed being that of how to pursue or recognise love. Is it primarily a form of action or of feeling? Can love be said to consist of giving? How does love relate to freedom and dependence? The consideration of these questions leads to the argument that love necessarily involves the creation of needs and therefore of vulnerability. The essay closes with a conception of how the conflict between love as action and love as feeling (‘the two sides of love’) may be resolved.     

A Dispositional Theory of Love

On a naive reading of the major accounts of love, love is a kind of mental event. A recent trend in the philosophical literature on love is to reject these accounts on the basis that they do not do justice to the historical dimension of love, as love essentially involves a distinctive kind of temporally extended pattern. Although the historicist account has advantages over the positions that it opposes, its appeal to the notion of a pattern is problematic. I will argue that an account of love as disposition, suitably construed, is superior to the historicist account in that it has the advantages the historicist account has without its problems. In addition, the dispositional account has advantages of its own.     

Tender Mercies: Love,Oatmeal, and the Quest for Wholeness

Tender Mercies (1983) is a simple and quiet film that reveals a complexity in its depiction of the many forms love can assume in the soul. Using some of C. G. Jung's and Robert Johnson's observations on the dynamic nature of love, the article tracks the plot of Horton Foote's award-winning screenplay as it unfolds the qualities of love, beginning with romantic love, the most popular form our current culture depicts and promotes, as well as perhaps less glamorous and outwardly exciting forms that nonetheless ground the soul in fuller, more sustainable relations between couples, father and daughter, father and son, as well as the deep passion for what excites and sustains us as creative persons. It also touches on the infernal form of addiction as a kind of fixed and fixated love that harbors no freedom for the individual; an addiction is understood as pornographic to the extent that it continues to promise what it cannot ever deliver, so the individual is always hooked by its fury. By looking closely at various scenes from the film, the author articulates the slow retrieval of one soul from addiction to a life full, whole, and satisfying in its creative and familial love.     

Love,Sex, Romance,and Psychoanalytic Goals

There are many ways for people to have meaningful relationships and satisfying lives, which may differ from the implicit Freudian psychoanalytic ideal of the couple that sustains love, intimacy, romance, and genital sexual passion throughout life. An alternative is proposed, based on the work of Harry Stack Sullivan, which examines the ability of the person to find love, sexual satisfaction, security, and happiness in a combination and arrangement that feels satisfying and that allows for interpersonal intimacy without coercing or harming another person. Good clinical work also considers what John Money called the “lovemap,” a cluster of relational and sexual patterning for the individual that can be relatively enduring throughout the lifespan.     

Love,passion, and peak experience: A qualitative study on six continents

Abstract

Qualitative inquiry promotes deeper understanding of human experiences that can be reduced and decontextualized when examined solely via quantitative methods. In this study, we interviewed 150 people in 22 countries on six continents, asking them, ‘What do you love?’, ‘What is a great passion in your life?’, and ‘What has been a peak experience in your life?’. Love, passion, and peak experience share definitional and theoretical overlaps. However, they have not been explored simultaneously across cultures using qualitative methods. We utilized a pragmatic, inductive, thematic methodology, and 11 key themes emerged from the data. Other people and learning and growing were the top two themes for all three constructs, and data patterns suggested more variation within than between continents. We suggest that love, passion, and peak experience may promote self-determination and/or psychological complexity via integration with and differentiation from the environment, and suggest directions for future research.     

Nussbaum: Love and Respect

This article details how Martha Nussbaum has heightened the potential tension between love and respect, flagged by Kant, by strengthening what each requires. She elaborates the particularism and disruptiveness of love while insisting on a cosmopolitanism of respect. The article suggests that dealing with this tension will require developing a more detailed theory of institutional justice, one that can extend to the international arena.     

Love,artificiality and mass identification

How are we to understand the phenomenon of mass identification, epitomised in recent exhibitions of national feeling such as that of South Africa’s 2010 Football World Cup celebrations? Rather than focusing on the concepts of discourse and nationalism, or advancing an analysis of empirical data, this paper outlines a conceptual response to the challenge at hand, drawing on the tools of psychoanalytic theory. Three explanatory perspectives come to the fore. Firstly, such exhibitions of mass emotion might be understood as demonstrations of love, as examples of the libidinal ties that constitute and consolidate mass identification. Secondly, the marked artificiality of such displays of emotion and the fact of the ‘externality’ they entail might be seen, paradoxically, to be essential rather than inauthentic or secondary features of the displays in question. Thirdly, we might advance, via Lacan, that many of our most powerful emotions require not only recourse to the field of the inter-subjective, but reference also to the anonymous, ‘fictional’ framework of available symbolic forms.     

Love,Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics

I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see that respect in the virtuous person cannot be blind to the individual, as critics of Kantian ethics contend. My approach contrasts recent efforts (Velleman and Bagnoli) to assimilate Kantian respect to Murdochian love, which overlook Murdoch's distinctive claims about the singularity of moral activity. This idea is not as un‐Kantian as it seems, and it should inform any Kantian ethics that aims to address the charge about individuals.     

Love: A Dimension of Life

This article explores love as a human behavior that has emotional, intellectual, volitional, relational, and transcendental dimensions. The emotional and the volitional dimensions seem to be essential. Even though love is often identified as a relationship with a particular person it is essentially a matter of caring about oneself and others.     

Love and Identity： Unconditional Concern and Particularity

Love for a person involves an idea of the other＇s particularity, or ＂irreplaceability＂： an idea that is linked with a fine grained attention to, and affection for, very specific features of the other. This attention is largely a consequence of--or manifestation of--my love, rather than its ground. What I see in the other is partly conditioned by an ＂unconditional＂ concern for her as an individual. A consideration of the importance of the face and of personal names in my interactions with another may bring into focus crucial aspects of the particularity and unconditionality that are characteristic of love.     

Love and Power,and the Development of the Brain,Mind, and Agency

In drawing on my own research and collaborative work with Karl Pribram, I show that love (affective attachment) and power (social control) play a central role in psychosocial evolution. When these relations are coupled in a self-regulating system of cooperative interactions, brain growth is stimulated, mind and agency develop, and stable forms of collective social organization are generated. Focusing on the endogenous dynamics of social collectives, the article is organized in four parts. (A "social collective" is defined as a durable arrangement of relations among two or more individuals that is distinguished by shared membership and collaboration in relation to a common function or goal.) Part I summarizes evidence from developmental neuropsychology and social science to show that stable psychosocial organization, across the human life span, is associated with social interaction organized along two dimensions. One dimension involves love, positive affective attachment, and the second involves power, social regulation of the aroused affective energy. Part II draws on Piaget's theory of cooperation and Bradley and Pribrams' theory of communication to describe how mind and agency are generated, and how stable organization is produced, respectively, from the relations involved in the arousal and regulation of affective energy. Combining elements of the two theories, Part III presents a sketch of a holographic model of collective organization in which goal-directed behavior is generated by a feed-forward process involving imaging and information processing of interaction along the two dimensions. Part IV shows how the model accounts for the emergence of human agency within the context of a more general evolutionary theory, such as Laszlo's. The article concludes with a discussion of my approach for building a "fully human theory of evolution."     

Passion and challenging goals: drawbacks of rushing into goal‐setting processes

This study shows that passion may have a potential downside for setting challenging goals. Hypotheses are developed by drawing on self‐determination theory and goal‐setting theory. Data is collected from a sample of 134 team leaders and hypotheses are tested using ordinary least squares regression analyses. Findings demonstrate that in a project context, team leaders' own competence positively influences their obsessive passion, while their perceptions of team members' competence positively influence their harmonious passion. Goal‐setting speed is included as a mediator in the relationship between passion and degree of goal challenge, proving both harmonious passion and obsessive passion ultimately negatively influence the ability to develop challenging goals because they increase the likelihood of rushing into the goal‐setting process.     

Taking the Love Pill: A Reply to Naar and Nyholm

In recent discussions about whether the use of a love pill to enhance love in our romantic relationships is desirable, one argument centres on the question whether this love pill would secure the final value we attribute to love. Sven Nyholm argues that it would not, because one thing we desire for its own sake is to be at the origin of the love others feel for us. In a reply, Hichem Naar argues against Nyholm that a love pill does not need to be incompatible with the final value we attribute to love and that a love pill can have a facilitating role in the creation and sustainment of loving attachment. I think Naar is right but does not address Nyholm's worry completely. I will argue that Naar and Nyholm are speaking of different ends for which the love pill is used as a means, and that whether the love pill would fail or not fail to secure the final value we attribute to love, depends on this particular end.     

Wolterstorff on Love and Justice

In Justice in Love, Nicholas Wolterstorff argues for a unique ethical orientation called “care‐agapism.” He offers it as an alternative to theories of benevolence‐agapism found in Christian ethics on the one hand and to the philosophical orientations of egoism, utilitarianism, and eudaimonism on the other. The purported uniqueness and superiority of his theory lies in its ability to account for the conceptual compatibility of love and justice while also positively incorporating self‐love. Yet in attempting to articulate a “bestowed worth” account of human dignity—in which dignity is given by divine love and respected in acts of justice—Wolterstorff leans on an unstable characterization of how love and the good are conceptually interwoven. As a result, his reader cannot be sure about the theoretical superiority of care‐agapism. Moreover, Wolterstorff's attempt to value self‐love and at the same time reject eudaimonism depends on a dubious interpretation of Augustine carried over from Justice: Rights and Wrongs, which itself further depends on a mischaracterization of the possible varieties of eudaimonism. This mistake is unfortunate because, on a closer reading of Augustine, one finds an agapistic account of eudaimonism that could have significantly helped Wolterstorff's overall account of the complementary relation of love and justice.     

“Love is only between living beings who are equal in power”: On what is alive (and what is dead) in Hegel's account of marriage

The paper develops a conception of marital love as a complex recognitive relation, which I articulate by juxtaposing it against other recognitive relations that figure in Hegel's theory of modern civil society (i.e., respect and esteem). Drawing on Hegel's early writings, I argue that, if love is to provide its unique sort of recognition, it must obtain between “living beings who are equal in power”—a peculiar form of equality that I name (drawing on Stanley Cavell's work) “dynamic equality.” I conclude that it is by Hegel's own lights that we should reject his notorious conception of the sexual difference. However, I also offer reasons why, from Hegel's early 19th century perspective, he could consider the following two conditions as compatible: (1) equality within marriage and (2) sexual hierarchy outside marriage, namely, in civil society.     

Love: gloriously amoral and arational

I argue that an evaluational conception of love collides with the way we value love. That way allows that love has causes, but not reasons, and it recognizes and celebrates a love that refuses to justify itself. Love has unjustified selectivity, due to its arbitrary causes. That imposes a non-tradability norm. A love for reasons, rational love or evaluational love would be propositional, and it therefore allows that the people we love are tradable commodities. A moralized conception of love is no less committed to treating those we love as tradable commodities; it is just that they are tradable moral commodities. An evaluative criterion of adequacy, I suggest, encourages the opposite view – a non-rational and non-evaluational concept of love. Such a love can set up partial obligations, which may even demand that one sacrifice one's life. Only a love that has causes but not reasons can have the kind of value that we think love has, and thus it would only be rational to pursue and foster such a love.     

In Defense of Trait‐Based Love

It is widely believed that a person's 1 traits can function as reasons for loving her. (Many a metropolitan rag, for instance, carries lonely hearts ads that attest to this belief with their laundry lists of coveted characteristics.) Notable contemporary work in the philosophy of love has taken the rejection of this premise as its point of departure. As far as I can tell, none of that work has engaged with a careful philosophical exposition of the view under discussion. In the following pages, I will defend the idea of trait‐based love against three of its critics and one of its advocates. I will discuss work on this topic by Harry Frankfurt, Niko Kolodny and David Velleman, arguing that their criticisms fail and that the alternatives they offer to trait‐based love create more difficulties than they solve. What these authors have in common is a deflationary approach to love that reduces it to a beneficent disposition, a valuing relationship and a visceral form of moral regard, respectively. I will compare these to the multiplex, nuanced depiction of trait‐based love in Plato's Symposium. While it is plausible that love can motivate a beneficent disposition, develop in relationships and entails moral regard, I will argue that the attempt to reduce it to any of the foregoing fails. Frankfurt, Kolodny and Velleman reject trait‐based love in part because they think it would differ in unacceptable ways from the love most of us practice. Plato advocates the cultivation of a love that in some respects resembles the picture of trait‐based love the contemporary authors balk at. However, unlike those critics, he appreciates that trait‐based love need not resemble the ideal he proposes. His richer view of love accounts for elements such as need and feeling that the contemporary thinkers are driven to implausibly bracket as distractions. As I will try to show, the most compelling criticisms of Platonic love do not tell against its responsiveness to the loved one's traits. I will argue that trait‐based love is consistent with an intuitive picture of love and that this commonsense approach is more defensible than competing views in these texts. These authors' disagreements about what can count as reasons for love are bound up with the differences in what each takes love to be. Thus, in the course of arguing for trait‐based love, I will critically assess their various proposals as to the nature of love.