Why do we love A philosophical inquiry Skye C. Cleary
Ah, romantic love -
beautiful and intoxicating,
heartbreaking and soul-crushing,
often all at the same time.
Why do we choose to put ourselves
through its emotional wringer?
Does love make our lives meaningful,
or is it an escape from our loneliness
and suffering?
Is love a disguise for our sexual desire,
or a trick of biology
to make us procreate?
Is it all we need?
Do we need it at all?
If romantic love has a purpose,
neither science nor psychology
has discovered it yet.
But over the course of history,
some of our most respected philosophers
have put forward some intriguing theories.
Love makes us whole, again.
The ancient Greek philosopher Plato
explored the idea that we love
in order to become complete.
In his “Symposium”,
he wrote about a dinner party,
at which Aristophanes, a comic playwright,
regales the guests
with the following story:
humans were once creatures with four arms,
four legs, and two faces.
One day, they angered the gods,
and Zeus sliced them all in two.
Since then, every person has been missing
half of him or herself.
Love is the longing to find a soulmate
who’ll make us feel whole again,
or, at least, that’s what Plato believed
a drunken comedian would say at a party.
Love tricks us into having babies.
Much, much later, German philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer
maintained that love
based in sexual desire
was a voluptuous illusion.
He suggested that we love because
our desires lead us to believe
that another person will make us happy,
but we are sorely mistaken.
Nature is tricking us into procreating,
and the loving fusion we seek
is consummated in our children.
When our sexual desires are satisfied,
we are thrown back
into our tormented existences,
and we succeed only in maintaining
the species
and perpetuating the cycle
of human drudgery.
Sounds like somebody needs a hug.
Love is escape from our loneliness.
According to the Nobel Prize-winning
British philosopher Bertrand Russell,
we love in order to quench
our physical and psychological desires.
Humans are designed to procreate,
but without the ecstasy
of passionate love,
sex is unsatisfying.
Our fear of the cold, cruel world
tempts us to build hard shells
to protect and isolate ourselves.
Love’s delight, intimacy, and warmth
helps us overcome our fear of the world,
escape our lonely shells,
and engage more abundantly in life.
Love enriches our whole being,
making it the best thing in life.
Love is a misleading affliction.
Siddhārtha Gautama,
who became known as the Buddha,
or the Enlightened One,
probably would have had some interesting
arguments with Russell.
Buddha proposed that we love because
we are trying to satisfy our base desires.
Yet, our passionate cravings are defects,
and attachments, even romantic love,
are a great source of suffering.
Luckily, Buddha discovered
the eight-fold path,
a sort of program for
extinguishing the fires of desire
so that we can reach Nirvana,
an enlightened state of peace, clarity,
wisdom, and compassion.
The novelist Cao Xueqin illustrated
this Buddhist sentiment
that romantic love is folly in
one of China’s greatest classical novels,
“Dream of the Red Chamber.”
In a subplot, Jia Rui
falls in love with Xi-feng
who tricks and humiliates him.
Conflicting emotions of love and hate
tear him apart,
so a Taoist gives him a magic mirror
that can cure him
as long as he doesn’t
look at the front of it.
But of course,
he looks at the front of it.
He sees Xi-feng.
His soul enters the mirror
and he is dragged away
in iron chains to die.
Not all Buddhists think this way
about romantic and erotic love,
but the moral of this story
is that such attachments
spell tragedy,
and should, along with magic mirrors,
be avoided.
Love lets us reach beyond ourselves.
Let’s end on a slightly
more positive note.
The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir
proposed that love is the desire
to integrate with another
and that it infuses our lives
with meaning.
However, she was less
concerned with why we love
and more interested
in how we can love better.
She saw that the problem
with traditional romantic love
is it can be so captivating,
that we are tempted to make it
our only reason for being.
Yet, dependence on another
to justify our existence
easily leads to boredom and power games.
To avoid this trap, Beauvoir advised
loving authentically,
which is more like a great friendship.
Lovers support each other
in discovering themselves,
reaching beyond themselves,
and enriching their lives
and the world together.
Though we might never know
why we fall in love,
we can be certain that it will be
an emotional rollercoaster ride.
It’s scary and exhilarating.
It makes us suffer
and makes us soar.
Maybe we lose ourselves.
Maybe we find ourselves.
It might be heartbreaking,
or it might just be
the best thing in life.
Will you dare to find out?