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<\/strong><\/h3>\nTo begin, let\u2019s admit that our language is unlikely to capture fully what we mean by love. Although useful, language has its limits.<\/p>\n
But we rely upon language to communicate. And despite its limits, it seems at least somewhat helpful. So let\u2019s talk with our alien inquirer.<\/p>\n
One option for defining love is simply to describe what people may mean each time they use the word. Take these examples:<\/p>\n
\u201cI love the Seattle Mariners.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI love my puppy.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI love God.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI love a man in uniform.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI love peperoni pizza.\u201d<\/p>\n
Our alien inquirer will quickly see the problem with this approach. We use \u201clove\u201d to describe our responses to so many things. Listing all of the instances may take a lifetime!<\/p>\n
Besides, we mean something different when we say, \u201cI love my impoverished neighbor\u201d and \u201cI love that girl\u2019s emerald-green eyes.\u201d The \u201clove is whatever it seems to mean, given the circumstances\u201d approach fails to inform our alien inquirer.<\/p>\n
A similar but more scholarly approach is to describe the history of how the word \u201clove\u201d has been used. \u00a0Philosopher Irving Singer\u2019s multi-volume work, The Nature of Love<\/em>, is perhaps the most comprehensive in this approach.<\/p>\n Irving traces major philosophers, cultural shifts, understandings of romance and marriage, and more. Noticeably absent in Irving\u2019s work, however, is much mention of love as a religious or theological category.<\/p>\n Irving\u2019s work, although a fascinating work of descriptive analytic philosophy, will likely leave our alien inquirer unsatisfied. History can be interesting. But as we read how \u201clove\u201d has been used, we naturally wonder what might unite these diverse notions. Love may be a many splendored thing, but its meanings are splintered in various ways!<\/p>\n If love is more than arbitrary word, we owe it to our alien inquirer to do more than mention every instance in which humans have used the word \u201clove.\u201d<\/p>\nLove may be a many splendored thing, but its meanings are splintered in various ways! <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n A more common approach to understanding love is to seek general love categories. Love takes many forms, and these forms seem to fall under several archetypes.<\/p>\n Philosopher Alan Soble specifies what he and most scholars consider the three primary love archetypes. Soble refers to the ancient Greek words: agape<\/em>, eros<\/em>, philia<\/em>.\u00a0 Nicholas Wolterstorff also identifies three forms of love, and they roughly correspond to the meaning of the three Greek words Soble mentions: love as benevolence, love as attraction, and love as attachment. Literary scholar C. S. works from these same categories, referring to \u201cgift-love\u201d (agape<\/em>), \u201cneed-love\u201d (eros<\/em>), friendship love (philia<\/em>). He adds a fourth: affection (storge<\/em>).<\/p>\n The attempt to place love into several major categories is laudable. And our alien inquirer may start to gain clarity.<\/p>\n But the work to categorize love into archetypes suggests that something unites the archetypal categories. It may be that philosopher John Armstrong is right when he says, \u201clove doesn\u2019t have an essence we can uncover.\u201d But just after claiming love has no essence, Armstrong says, \u201cit has, rather, a set of themes that interact differently in different instances of love.\u201d<\/p>\n So\u2026 how do we know when we encounter an \u201cinstance of love,\u201d to use Armstrong\u2019s phrase? Doesn\u2019t this suggest we presuppose some uniting essence or core notion?<\/p>\n In my research, I\u2019ve discovered four general ways of understanding love.<\/p>\n One way focuses on desire and intentionality. Let\u2019s call it \u201cthe desire understanding of love.\u201d This approach draws from Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and the Neo-Platonic tradition.<\/p>\n The desire understanding of love thinks love is desire that motivates action. Thomas Aquinas puts it this way: \u201cevery agent, whatever it be, does every action from love of some kind.\u201d This approach tends to talk about proper or improper loves. Or it talks about virtuous love or love deformed. The essence of love, from this perspective, is desire.<\/p>\n The second way focuses on relationality. Let\u2019s call it \u201cthe relational understanding of love.\u201d This approach is less common historically, but it is growing in popularity, as relational approaches to metaphysics seem to many more plausible.<\/p>\n The relational understanding of love says the reciprocity inherent in any relationship is itself love. Philosopher Charles Hartshorne uses the phrase \u201clife sharing\u201d to define love as mutuality. Hartshorne says, \u201clove means realization in oneself of the desires and experiences of others, so that one who loves can in so far inflict suffering only by undergoing this suffering himself.\u201d (Hartshorne uses the classic word, \u201csuffering,\u201d here in the way we\u2019d use \u201crelational\u201d today.)<\/p>\n The third way to understand love focuses on feelings. This \u201cfeeling understanding of love\u201d is common among psychologists. From the scholarly literature, however, it is difficult to ascertain what this feeling precisely entails. For this reason, the feeling understanding of love may simply describe the emotional content of the desires or relationships of the one loving.<\/p>\n The fourth way focuses on positive results. Or at least it says positive results are the intention of the one doing the loving. Let\u2019s call this \u201cthe well-being understanding of love.\u201d<\/p>\n In the well-being understanding, the lover is motivated to promote good. Gary Chartier defines love in the well-being sense when he says love is \u201ca positive orientation on the other.\u201d The essence of love, according to this understanding, is promoting the good.<\/p>\nThe essence of love, according to this understanding, is promoting the good. <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n For a number of reasons, I prefer the fourth understanding of love. But I think the other understandings provide necessary components to a normative definition of love. For this reason, I define love in this way:<\/p>\n \u201cTo love is to act intentionally, in sympathetic\/empathetic response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n I use the phrase \u201cto act intentionally\u201d to take into account the desire aspect of love, which I think always accompanies those actions we rightly deem loving. I use the phrase \u201cin sympathetic\/empathetic response to others\u201d to taking into account the relational\/mutuality aspect of love, which I think is always present when we love.<\/p>\n The phrase \u201cpromote overall well-being\u201d is the main object of the sentence, because in my mind the essence of love is promoting what is good. I\u2019ve inserted \u201coverall\u201d into this statement on well-being, because I want to account for personal well-being, social well-being, ecological well-being, and more.<\/p>\n Of course, I could and should say more about each aspect of my definition. I didn\u2019t even explain why I\u2019ve inserted the theological phrase, \u201c(including God),\u201d in my definition. I explain my definition further in my books, Defining Love: A Philosophical, Scientific, and Theological Engagement<\/em> and The Nature of Love: A Theology<\/em>.<\/p>\n So\u2026 back to our inquiring alien from Planet X. If asked at Starbucks what love is \u2013 and I didn\u2019t have an hour to explain what I\u2019ve written above \u2013 I might sing a (slightly altered) line from a Paul McCartney song:<\/p>\n \u201cmy love does \u2026 good!\u201d<\/p>\nTo love is to act intentionally, in response to others (including God), to promote overall well-being. <\/a><\/span>Share on X<\/a><\/span>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Suppose an alien from Planet X leaned over the counter at Starbucks and asked, \u201cWhat is this \u2018love\u2019 I hear spoken of on your planet?\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[391,392,393,394,395,396,397,390,377,15,17,18,25,29,34,80,95,99,324,374,375,376,378,379,380,381,382,383,384,385,386,387,388,389],"yst_prominent_words":[3899,1021,1069,1101,1194,3897,3898,3900,3901,3902,3903,3904,3905,3906,3907,3908,3909,3910,3911,3912],"class_list":["post-2054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-love_and_altruism","tag-in-response","tag-sympathetic","tag-empathetic","tag-overall-well-being","tag-thomas-aquinas","tag-paul-mccartney","tag-foreigner","tag-intentionally","tag-neo-platonic","tag-thomasjayoord","tag-god","tag-theology","tag-love","tag-relational","tag-thomas-oord","tag-agape","tag-defining-love","tag-well-being","tag-augustine","tag-plato","tag-eros","tag-philia","tag-wolterstorff","tag-storge","tag-alan-soble","tag-john-armstrong","tag-irving-singer","tag-the-nature-of-love","tag-archetypes-of-love","tag-normative-definition-of-love","tag-charles-hartshorne","tag-suffering","tag-gary-chartier","tag-definition-of-love"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2054"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2054"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thomasjayoord.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=2054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The Archetypes of Love<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Toward A Normative Definition of Love<\/strong><\/h3>\n
My Definition of Love<\/strong><\/h3>\n