The following are two combined half-vomits written on the train. Incoherent, etc. You shouldn’t bother reading this. I’ll go back over this in a few months time and summarize everything into the crystalized TL;DRs.
Moment of clarity on the train this morning through a mix of articles read and Facebook posts witnessed. There is no such thing as a level playing field and if you want to succeed on whatever plane you have chosen you have to play asymmetrical. Some might call it playing dirty. Dirty is simply whatever has been established by the collective to be unacceptable because it involves risk that most individuals are uncomfortable with. The concept of dirty is a sort of insurance. Morality is a sort of insurance. That doesn’t render it invalid or bad- invalid and bad are concepts too and we’re so entrenched in them on a day to day basis that we can’t transcend them- its encoded in our language. To be human is to have to grapple with these tedious things. Ultimately it’s all a matter of perception. Reality is perception with an army and navy. Reality is perception backed by power. Power is leverage to shape reality.
The problem with discussions of power is that it’s often myopic. People think of it in an individualistic sense. But people are more than just individuals.
It’s always funny when individuals infatuated with the idea of “survival of the fittest” complain that people don’t get them, or that people rise up and rebel against them. The collective weak can be fitter than the individually strong, and the beheading of a king by an unruly mob is, within those circumstances, survival of the fittess at play. You were too eager to fanboy a theory you didn’t fully understand and it swallowed you up for lunch.
You can’t afford to treat anybody with contempt or disrespect because they can organize against you.
What’s the point of all this? It’s rooted in the realization that persuasion is actually limited by power- yes, persuasive skills are a form of power too, but they have diminishing returns if they are not backed by might.
Might in this sense does not need to be physical, although a strong case can be made for the necessity of physical strength. It is the final determiner. You can mock the grotesquely obsessed dysmorphic roid-snorting monster, but he’s an extreme case (and he can probably still kick your ass). There was a funny moment when Justin Beiber started working out and got fitter than a lot of his haters. The truly fit have no time to hate. Hate is largely a consequence of imprecise thought- it is blunt and it is obsolete in a world where you can’t simply bludgeon your enemies to death…
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We fall in love with lots of things but rarely people.
We fall in love with our ideas of people, but loving a person in their entirety- flaws, weaknesses, insecurities, baggage- is incredibly hard. And so important to do. Because we need it ourselves. And we’re the only ones who can provide it.
Clearly our language is oversimplistic and needs an upgrade. We use the word love so often, so easily, in so many circumstances that it loses its meaning. It loses its usefulness as a descriptor. She loved him- what does that mean? What does that tell us about her, about him, about any relationship they might have had? Next to nothing, actually. So much more context is required. Who’s saying it, why, and what do they really mean?
The problem with a question like “What is love” isn’t that love is mysterious and complex and indescipherable or indescribable. We just use it to describe too many different things. The confusion that arises in the discussion of love is largely a consequence of our collective laziness in evaluating our own emotional states and our internal worlds. It can’t be as impossibly complex as we make it out to be. Immensely complex, sure. Impossibly complex, I doubt it.
Can we know ourselves? I believe we can.
Let’s regroup. Why did I begin this train of thought? I read a quote that went something like “I rarely love the entirety of a person.” It struck me as something really true, and it reminded me of many long conversations I’ve had with friends about mistaking the map for the territory. We often if not always love our idea of a person more than the person himself. We often don’t even bother to really get to know the person properly. We rarely listen. We seek to confirm our hypotheses rather than disconfirm them, which was established by Karl Popper as the source of scientific knowledge. This is a cognitive bias and we can’t hate ourselves for it- it is what it is, we’ve inherited it from our predecessors and it served them well.
I find dancers, athletes and musicians attractive. I now have to qualify that- we can’t reduce people to their pursuits. Every human being is different. That said, we can’t escape the law of large numbers and people do fall within some sort of statistical distribution. There’s a certain magic and sparkle about these people. There’s something intrinsically poetic about the body of an athlete or dancer or anybody who’s invested so much of their time and energy into a craft that it’s literally changed the way their bodies look.
Part of this could be a biological response- people who are fit are strong, reliable, ideal for mating and child-rearing, dependable. They’ve got your back. I remember being attracted to a girl who had a muscular back (I believe from playing netball). Allison Stokke. Michelle Jenneke. Samantha Wright. Hundreds of male football players, rugby players. I think it goes beyond the physical. There’s something that alludes to psychological fitness, emotional fitness. Perhaps it’s a false correlation quickly and lazily assumed by the subconscious mind- but I think there’s some useful morsel of maybe-truth in there. A person who has the will to persist at something- they’re something special, aren’t they? Or are they not? Why isn’t everybody working really hard at something amazing? (Or are they? Heh.)
Sure, we all participate in ultra-broad processes like the emergence of language but that’s almost imperceptible. Not everybody is Shakespeare, inventing words that become common usage. There’s always some sort of statistical distribution. (Random but I’ve always been curious to know if the statistical distribution of the spread or variance of statistical distributions falls within a normal distribution)…
thoughts abruptly ended here when I got to work
Random Burst Response:
The most difficult part of my research on love (thus far) was deciding on the best way to capture the ‘essence’ of love in a manner that is neither reductive nor overtly poetic. It was also challenging to attempt to discern the meaning of love when ‘the meaning of meaning’ is in itself near impossible to define. One of the few useful definitions of ‘meaning’ I discovered was from Schutz, who describes it as “the result of an interpretation of a past experience looked at from the present. Now with a reflexive attitude”. Not flawless, but good enough to work from on an empirical level.
Another useful approach I discovered centers on the importance of treating ‘love’ as a social phenomenon, or ‘social fact’ – something that achieves a level of ‘epistemic objectivity’ through people’s collective belief in its existence. Whether or not there is an ontological ‘truth’ of love is irrelevant; what is important is to treat love as an experience whereby people are able to construct a certain kind of truth that is relevant to their lives (e.g. love for family, love for wife/husband, love for friends, all of which become grounded in purposive social actions oriented towards others). From this treatment, it becomes easier to extrapolate the essential features of ‘what love is’ from its idiosyncratic instances – i.e. love as a medium of communication between two or more persons, not as an actual ‘thing’ per se (I believe that much of the confusion surrounding love stems from our tendencies to see it as an ‘object’ to ruminate over, and not a process)
My position is that it is quite fruitless to look at the word ‘love’ and try to philosophically discern its meaning in isolation, as many past thinkers were wont to do. That would be a self-defeating exercise, IMHO, since love is, by its very nature, intersubjective. I see ‘love’ as something that is embodied, an event that is ‘lived out’ and made ‘real’ through the movement of mind and body – it cannot be otherwise. Thus, restricting any discussions on love to the realm of abstractions will surely ring hollow. For us to make sense of ‘what love is’, we must begin from the level of concrete action.
oh wow, this is really cool. going to read it more carefully on the way to work tomorrow. agreed completely on the impossibility of abstracting. “interpretation of a past experience looked at from the presence”- damn, that’s cogent!
also, the more I hear you describe your work the more I’m confident that it’s something incredibly important and necessary. so excited for you; can’t wait to see it bear fruit and enter popular consciousness (I bet it will, because it will be USEFUL to real people in real situations- Daniel Kanehman described how his goal when writing about cognitive biases was to provide people with terms and a language that they can use to describe our situations better, so we can better make sense of them and figure out how to deal with them- I get the sense that you’re doing the same thing for romantic love, which is just a PHENOMENAL (lol) undertaking
P.S. Great writing for this post btw.
This paragraph you wrote:
“Clearly our language is oversimplistic and needs an upgrade. We use the word love so often, so easily, in so many circumstances that it loses its meaning. It loses its usefulness as a descriptor. She loved him- what does that mean? What does that tell us about her, about him, about any relationship they might have had? Next to nothing, actually. So much more context is required. Who’s saying it, why, and what do they really mean?”
I think captures the confusions of love really well. It is true, I think, that love is used to encompass many meanings. I think it is particularly true for English, and less so for other languages (French, in particular). Anyway, you will probably enjoy this non-academic book immensely, I know I did.
http://www.amazon.com/A-Natural-History-Of-Love/dp/0679761837/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1370971661&sr=8-1&keywords=the+natural+history+of+love
When I say non-academic, I don’t mean it to be ‘simplistic’. It’s a very thoroughly researched book. I just mean that the author has a beautiful, COHERENT, poetic way with words that captures love wonderfully — in a way that anyone can read and go “Sigh, wonderful writing”. A striking historical account of the meaning of love. One of the best books I read on love ,and I’ve read too many to count.
i’ve seen it crop up in a couple of online discussions but never paid it much attention. going to go buy it. thanks for the recommendation!
I guess ultimately I am wrestling not only with ‘what’ is love, but more pertinently, –why– do we love? We have traditionally resigned the answers to this ‘why’ to ideals of religion, cosmic fate, evolution, genetics, etc. – some form of be-all-end-all causal explanation. But I think it is more important to contextualize this key question to the realm of everyday, even mundane, life. Why do we try to make our loved ones happy? Why do we cook a nice meal for them, why do we take the time to utter kind words to them in moments of distress, why? I think those types of questions are more pragmatic, more grounded in our day-to-day actions, our intentions, our life-plans.
yes! and that’s the question that, when answered well, will actually be helpful to real people struggling with real problems, or people looking to understand themselves and each other better (repeating myself but your work is so important)